Be Myself! - 31. Binding Truth

After dinner, Mr Viñas encouraged the guests to stay for as long as they wanted. We moved on to the couches, served everyone a round of tea, and the conversation naturally stirred towards Oliver’s transition. “So what exactly do we have to do to get Oliver on hormones?” Ms Savage asked Luce. We had just been talking about the options of treatment offered to trans people in the public health system, and Luce mentioned that hormones were usually the first step towards physical changes.

“Actually, Oliver is still too young to get on any kind of hormones,” Luce answered, giving Oliver a look that said ‘I know this sucks, I’ve been through it and so will you. Be prepared.’ “People are not allowed to start any physical transition until they turn eighteen.”

“Really? Then how do you manage until then?” Ms Savage asked. She was beginning to get agitated. The way she straightened her upper body reminded me of the first time we met. She had looked exactly like that while arguing with my parents. I backed away from her slightly, and so did Oliver.

“They give you hormone blockers. It stops puberty so that you don’t get any further unwanted developments until you’re allowed on actual hormones,” Charlie answered. She also sounded pissed. Ms Savage was picking up on their mood and acting accordingly. “Doctors think of hormone blockers as ‘safe’ treatment for children because it has no long- term effect. Like, if a child on hormone blockers decides they’re not trans after all, as soon as they stop taking the blockers, their puberty will go on as if nothing had happened.”

“It does sound pretty reasonable,” Mr Viñas said. “But I guess it’s not so great when you’re definitely sure about your gender and the doctors refuse to believe you.”

“Sometimes they do believe you, but they still can’t do anything about it.” Luce rolled her eyes. “I mean, look at me. Nowadays people can’t even imagine me looking like a boy, but it’s still going to be a whole year before they can give something that will make me grow boobs!”

“Mum, can I grow boobs too?” Sam asked. He had been allowed to stay with us past his bedtime because when we told him to go sleep he threw an emotionally-charged tantrum saying he wanted to know what was going to happen to his brother because he cared about Oliver and wanted to be a good little brother. Oliver did not have the heart to tell him to go away, and so the parents agreed that Sam could stay a little longer.

We should probably have seen that coming.

“Well, if that’s what you want… but apparently you have to wait another ten years.” Ms Savage smiled. Sam’s interruption seemed to have dissipated some of her outrage.

“But that’s so long! It’s more than I’ve been alive!” the boy protested. “I want to grow boobs now!”

“Get a bra and put socks in it,” Luce suggested. “Though you’re still kind of young to go through puberty, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want puberty, I just want the boobs! I want big ones like Ariadne’s, so I can put things on them when my hands are busy!” There was a moment of silence following the reveal of Sam’s true intentions that indicated a general wish to face-palm. Out of respect for the boy’s fantasies, though, nobody groaned loudly or rolled their eyes. Ariadne blushed.

“It’s… it’s not really a good thing to have big boobs,” she said at least, looking down and fiddling with her own hands. “They’re heavy, they hurt my back, and I definitely can’t hold things on top of them.”

“Ah, shame. Then I’ll have them for the airbag function.” This time Ms Savage rolled her eyes. The guests seemed a little too stunned by that point to have any kind of reaction at all, so Ms Savage decided Sam had finally gone too far.

“You know, Sammy, I think it’s getting a little late for your young mind to work properly. Go brush your teeth and come back here to say goodnight to the guests.”

“But mum, you promised I could stay longer!”

“And you have stayed longer. It’s half-past ten. I think it’s way too long.” Sam grumbled, but did not challenge his mother any further. Once Sam had disappeared from the living room, Ms Savage turned back to the guests. “Sorry about him, I think he was getting too tired for his own good.”

“It’s fine, we all had kids that age before,” Ms Hanson reassured Oliver’s mum. “Luce wanted to be a flight attendant because she thought they would take her to the moon.”

“Mum!” We laughed more at Luce’s indignant protest than the story itself, but either way it was a welcomed change of subject for Ariadne. Her cheeks were still slightly red for a while afterwards, but at least she faced the people around her again.

“So, back to hormones and hormone blockers…” Ms Savage took the responsibility of putting the conversation back on track. “How can Oliver get them? Can we just talk to our GP and have them prescribed?”

“No. You’ll have to get Oliver an appointment at the gender clinic.” Ms Hanson answered. “That’s the place that manages most transition processes in Scotland. They’ll want to see you, talk about Oliver’s life, see if he has family support, and then they will decide what kind of treatment, if any, they can give Oliver.”

“You sound like you don’t like them,” Ms Savage noticed. She furrowed her eyebrows and straightened her posture again.

“I don’t think anyone likes them.” It was Mr Higgs who answered. “To begin with, there’s a very long waiting list for appointments, they’re terribly short-staffed, and they tend to hold on to very outdated notions of gender, particularly when it involves children.”

“And they definitely don’t like us,” Ms Higgs added. “They have been trying to subtly force Charlie to decide if she wants to take oestrogen or just let her natural testosterone act. They don’t take her fluid identity seriously.”

“They still think it’s some kind of phase despite, you know, me being half-a-year from turning eighteen and having identified this way for most of my life,” Charlie concluded. “The only reason they agreed to give me hormone blockers in the first place was because my parents are lawyers and thus trained to deal with those kinds of sneaky arseholes. Technically, they’re not supposed to deny you treatment if you identify as trans, but if they don’t like you, they’ll try to delay any treatment as much as possible.”

“That’s horrible.” Ms Savage did not look pleased. Her husband put a hand on her arm to calm her down. “If they try to pull something like that on Oliver…”

“Hopefully they won’t. But even if everything goes smoothly, it’ll still be a while before Oliver can see any of the doctors, and then even longer before he can get the hormone blockers.”

“How much longer?” Oliver asked, his voice sounding higher than usual.

“Best case scenario, if you go there tomorrow to ask for an appointment, you’ll hopefully be seen in the next six months. Then another three or four months to the next appointment, and so best case scenario, you get on hormone blockers by June next year,” Charlie answered, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible.

“It took me a whole year,” Luce added. “As you can tell, by the time I got it, I had already gotten really tall and my voice had broken. All that time, I kept thinking that the blockers would come too late, and that nobody would ever see me as a girl.” Charlie gave Luce a comforting hug, and the blond smiled weakly. “Now I know it’s not like that, but back then the wait was horrible. I don’t want to scare you, Oliver, but I think it’s only fair that you’re prepared for what is to come.”

“Thanks, I guess.” Oliver did not look reassured, so I hugged him, mirroring Charlie’s gesture.

“And, you know, if you ever feel like it’s taking too long, you can try to remember that most people actually transition a lot later than us, and they still come out feeling pretty good,” Luce added, slightly more cheerful.

“I’ll try to remember that.”

“By the time we’re done, we will not only look fabulous, but we’ll have mastered the art of patience,” Luce noted, speaking in a faux-solemn tone. The conversation became more cheerful after that, with talks about Luce’s future plans of becoming a fashion model, or stylist, or most likely both. There were some more snarky comments made about the gender clinic, about the specific doctors Oliver was likely to meet (one of them believed all trans girls should wear skirts at all times or they were not really trans), and about the sadly common administrative blunders the clinic was prone to making. Apparently they had double-booked Charlie twice, and lost Luce’s file once.

Ms Savage and Mr Viñas got the address of the gender clinic and promised to take Oliver there the next day. Everyone agreed that the sooner they asked for an appointment, the better. The headmistress said she saw no problem with letting Oliver leave school early that day. They would consider it a ‘doctor’s appointment’ so that Oliver’s absence would not be considered suspicious.

It was almost midnight by the time our guests left. We were all very aware that this would most likely make our Monday morning more of a horror story than usual, but it had been worth it. Oliver’s parents had heard from other parents what it was like to have a transgender child, and as a result felt a lot more confident in their role of supporting Oliver’s transition. The prospect of dealing with an unhelpful and possibly obstructive gender clinic was not all that appealing, but there was no way around it. At least when the time came, we would be prepared.

(...)

According to Oliver, the visit to the gender clinic went as well as it could have been expected. The place was actually a general sexual health clinic that housed the gender clinic as an additional service. As Oliver told me this, he produced a purple paper bag from his backpack and threw it towards me.

“What is this?” I asked him. I was sitting on his bed, while he was crouched on the ground where he had previously unceremoniously dumped his backpack. He had come into the room full of energy and with a bright smile, and demanded that I listened to his news. His enthusiasm was kind of cute.

“Condoms. They give those for free if you ask them.” Oliver’s smile morphed into the kind of grin I had come to associate with Jean.

“Is that why you’re so happy?” I opened the bag and dropped the contents in front of me on the mattress. There were twelve condoms in total. Considering the way Oliver was grinning, I wondered how long they would last.

“In part, yes. But there’re some other things.” Oliver sat beside me and began fiddling with the condom packs. “I saw some leaflets while I was there. I think I can stop my periods before I get on hormone blockers in a way that will make me not even realise it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have a contraceptive injection that lasts three months and as a side-effect, stops periods until you stop taking it.” Oliver kept fiddling with the condoms, not looking at me. He sounded a weird mixture of excited and nervous.

“That’s good news, right?” I asked him, in case I was reading his tone wrong.

“Yeah. I hate pills, and I’m supposed to stop taking them every three weeks anyway so I can bleed away.” That sounded disgusting, but I made no comment. “Every time I take those things it’s like shoving in my face that I’m really a girl and no matter what I do my body will keep trying to make babies.”

“But you’re not a girl.”

“I know that. It just doesn’t feel that way sometimes. And I can’t really escape it. Taking the pills makes me dysphoric, but bleeding every month makes me dysphoric too. So even if I didn’t have to take anything because you were not around it would still feel horrible.”

“But this new thing you found…” Oliver was almost crunching the condom packs. I wanted to make him think of happier things before he became too upset.

“It’s a contraceptive injection. Like, a higher dosage of the stuff that’s in the pill. It lasts for three months, and during that time I don’t bleed, and I don’t have to remember that I’ve taken contraceptives at all.” Oliver stopped fiddling with the condoms, but the packs looked definitely worse for wear. Thankfully they had not burst.

“That’s perfect, then, right?”

“Kinda. I still have to actually take injections, so I would still get dysphoric every three months. And it’s an injection of girl hormones, so in a sense I’m kind of making myself even more girly.”

“Didn’t you say that what makes you a guy is that you think of yourself as a guy? Doesn’t that mean that your hormones are guy hormones?” I vaguely remembered Luce saying at some point that her body was female no matter what it looked like because she was a girl. So supposedly the same logic could be applied to hormones.

“It doesn’t work that way, at least not on the deep level. I can tell myself all I want that my chest is manly because I’m a guy, but at the end of the day I still can’t look at it without feeling like I want to rip it off.” Oliver sighed. He dropped the condoms and closed his hands into fists. “I didn’t mind taking pills before. All I used to think was that I was grateful that no parasitic babies would find their way inside me after a good fuck. But now it’s just this constant reminder of everything that’s wrong with my body. I feel sick when I take the pills, but I still have to keep doing it because the alternative is so much worse.”

“But shouldn’t condoms be enough to…” I tried to say, but Oliver interrupted me with a hand gesture. He laughed, but it was that kind of sarcastic laughter that told me how pathetic I was being.

“Oh, please, have you ever had any sex education at all? Condoms are the best thing to prevent STIs and all, but they can fail, particularly if you don’t know how to use them properly. Pills fail too, but much less. So the best option is to take both, and get better protection against everything.”

“You seem to know a lot about those things.” The most I had been specifically taught was that condoms were everything I would ever need. As long as I always used them (I guess everybody assumed I would always be ‘on top’), I was safe.

“Well, yeah, I have to.” Oliver stared at me like I was some sort of clueless alien. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I like to fuck. My parents have been giving me safe sex tips since way before puberty.”

“What? Weren’t you too young to…”

“To what? To know how my genitals work and how I came into existence? Or to know that once I got older I could do this cool thing with other people and have lots of fun?” Oliver rolled his eyes. It was hard to tell if he was disappointed with me or amused by my ignorance. “Please, Oscar, it’s not like they were having sex in front of me or anything. They’ve just always called things by their proper names and didn’t try to hide the fact that fucking is fun and natural and not something I should be ashamed of.”

“Ok, I get it. It’s just…”

“A mind fuck?” Oliver finished my lines for me. I was reluctant to put it in those terms, but it was essentially the truth. I nodded, and he laughed. At least this time he sounded definitely amused. It was good to see his mood improving, even if I was the target of that amusement.

“All I got told was that I should be careful about who I had sex with, but at the same time everyone seemed to imply that I should do it as often as possible because that’s what guys do.”

“Argh, that’s really terrible.” Oliver gave me a sympathetic look and walked to the bookshelf next to the bed. He stared at it for a while before pulling a book out and throwing it at me the same way he had thrown the bag of condoms earlier. “Read this when you can. It’s the next best thing after learning from competent parents.”

I looked at the book in my hands and my jaw dropped. The cover was some abstract art showing shapes that vaguely resembled weirdly twisted bodies. Some of the shapes were blue, others were pink, and there were some purple spaces at random places. The title read ‘Bringing Up Children in a Sex-Positive Environment: Destroying Shame and Secrecy from the Cradle to the Grave’, and the author was none less than Miranda Savage.

“Your mum wrote a sex education book?” My voice went so high it reached octaves I had not been able to produce since I left kindergarten. “How…?”

“She had the idea when I was born, and figured there would be a market for it, so she went to the publishers and they liked it. She wrote everything before I was even walking.” Oliver grinned. He was probably enjoying my astonishment. “Isn’t it cool?”

“Yeah, I guess…” I looked at the book again, and the distorted human shapes seemed to glare at me, challenging me to read the whole book like it was some feat of courage. I would effectively be learning about sex from my boyfriend’s mother. I would most likely read the whole book in her voice. It would be like sitting with Ms Savage for tea and hearing everything there was to hear about vaginas, penises, and those things I had been taught never to think about. On one level, it was utterly disturbing. But it also meant I would effectively force myself to destroy a whole load of my parents’ teaching, and that was not so bad. It was almost appealing.

“Then how about you start with a practical lesson?”

Since his coming out, Oliver had often surprised me. Apart from the sad things linked to his body dysphoria, he had become more impulsive, adventurous, and open about things he liked and things he wanted to do. Sometimes, like now, he came dangerously close to Jean in terms of shameless flirting. I figured it was because realising who he really was had allowed my boyfriend to explore things in different ways, to shape who this new Oliver was going to become. And I was all for being supportive of these discoveries. I was glad Oliver was finding his true self. I really was.

It was just that, sometimes, like now, I could not really make sense of his motivations and weird changes of mood. How could he feel like having sex right after feeling so repulsed about his own body? Not ten minutes had passed since he was almost destroying innocent condom packs in despair. And now he was swiftly moving on top of me, grinning like a naughty boy going for the cookie jar, and I could not figure out what had caused his mood to change so much.

But still, like always, it ended up being a good time. I was beginning to realise that I was very easy to persuade. It did not take much to make me feel like having sex. On my own, I almost never fantasised about it, but when other people seemed so enthusiastic about taking me along, I did not want to refuse.

(...)

Later that day, after dinner had been eaten and Sam had tried all possible arguments to stay awake past his bedtime again, Oliver and I were having a quiet time in his room. He was on the computer, and I decided to give his mother’s book a go. As I feared, I read everything in her voice, but after the first five pages it stopped bothering me too much.

“Oscar, can you help me with something?” Oliver called. He was holding a measuring tape, though I had no idea where he had gotten that from, or when.

“What?” I got up and walked to Oliver’s desk. The screen on his computer showed a table of sizes and measurements, but I could not see what they were for.

“I need to measure my chest.” He started to take off his shirt. “I will hold this at the front, and I need you to tell me what it says.” He put the tape on his nipples and began to circle his chest area. Understanding what he wanted me to do, I took the ends of the tape and closed it around his back.

“Ninety-six centimetres, thirty-eight inches,” I told him. Oliver freed himself from the tape and checked the screen. His face fell.

“You sure? Can we try again? It can’t be too tight, but maybe it was too loose…” He got up and put the tape around his nipples again.

“What are you measuring it for?” Oliver had never been comfortable with me seeing or touching his chest. It had to be something important to make him readily strip like that.

“I’m getting a binder. What does it say?”

“Still ninety-six. What’s a binder?” Oliver sighed. He hurriedly put his shirt back on and rolled the tape in a neat and compact swirl. Then he showed me his computer screen with the sizes tables.

“It’s something I can use to disguise the volume on my chest. It flattens it down so it looks more masculine. Mum said I could get one for when I come out at school, so I’ve been doing some research.” Oliver opened another tab, and I saw a picture of a guy wearing a white shirt. Oliver zoomed in on the picture, so it became clear that the part of the shirt that was over the chest was made of a slightly different material. “This thing has a Velcro opening on the side, but otherwise looks like a normal shirt I can wear under my clothes.”

“That sounds cool. So you were checking what size of it to get?” Those binders sounded like a magical solution to Oliver’s problems, but judging by his overall defeated expression, it was not so great.

“Yeah, and apparently I’ll need an XL binder. I didn’t think my chest was that big.”

So that was the reason for his disappointment. “But the binder will flatten it anyway, right?”

“They say that the bigger you are, the more difficult it is to actually get a flat chest. If you’re too big, it doesn’t do much at all.” Oliver sighed again, and grabbed his hair in frustration. He was pointedly refusing to look at his chest.

“So you think that even if you get one, it won’t look good?”

“Yeah. I’ll still be stuck with two obvious lumps that will out me no matter what I do.”

“Maybe it’s still worth a try, though. It might not get it all flat, but maybe it will make it small enough that you can disguise it with an extra layer of clothes?” Oliver was always wearing at least one more layer than everyone else, disguising the volume on his chest at the cost of a comfortable body temperature.

“I’m going to get it anyway; I just don’t know how good it’ll be.” Oliver clicked the ‘buy’ button and left the room. He came back with his mother’s credit card. I helped him check that he wrote everything correctly on the site, and he clicked ‘confirm transaction’. Oliver officially owned a binder, and it would hopefully arrive just in time for his school coming out.