Dancing in the OR: My Orchiectomy
(2005)
The night before my flight to Miami I slept over at Mom and Dad’s. In their fold-out bed, I had a long, exhausting dream where I try in vain to find a certain place. This mirrored my exhaustive contemplation about the personal meaning of my orchiectomy, to be performed in a couple of days. Before I came to identify as a woman, I had been as attached to my testicles as any man.
For the end of the dream, the place I’ve been seeking seems to find me. In my vicinity, is a collection of people I have passed during the dream without recognizing their significance. Two of them are women standing on either side of me. They are angry with me for not having recognized them earlier. They begin dying by dematerializing from human form into something yellow and gross that decomposing testicles might look like. As the decomposition commences, an overpowering force enters the dream saying that this is the wrath of God. A moment later someone is calling my boy name. It was my mother rousing me from sleep.
The dream represented the to-be-harvested parts of my body as angry with me, like spurned women would feel, like ex-girlfriends had felt when I left them. Clearly, as long as I had testicles, women would scorn me. Even my own body was angry with me. Proceeding with life would be impossible without the operation.
The dream’s “overpowering force” revealed its impersonal, spiritual aspect, which was God’s “wrath.” Certainly, to de-masculinize and castrate a man appeared wrathful, yet it was not since wrath is an end in itself. God is incapable of wrath. God’s intent is to subject monks and nuns, like me, to his/her will in order to make conscious and embody increasingly Divine freedom.
Carrying the awareness of the women’s anger and God’s wrath to Florida with me, I was even more serious and focused than I had been in the days just prior to flight.
~~~
Hurricane Wilma had recently passed through southern Florida. Palm trees were broken and coconuts were all over the place. Wilma was Fred Flintstone’s wife. Her hurricane was the force of the prehistoric feminine. She was a mighty castratrix.
My room was spacious, with two beds, a kitchenette and a balcony that looked onto a canal and out to Biscayne Bay. I was happy.
After settling in, I walked to the Reed Centre, where the orchiectomy would be performed, just to see where it was. I had the address memorized, but in my mind I mixed it up with the centre’s zip code, so I didn’t find it. I returned to the motel feeling incompetent and a little upset.
The motel was called the Whitehouse because it had a rounded façade with columns and flags, recalling the presidential Whitehouse. A shiny black Buddha presided atop the Whitehouse’s reception desk. It seemed unlikely that there had ever been a Buddha in the presidents’ Whitehouse.
When I left the motel to get dinner, white men in gigantic trucks were returning from work. I heard one tell another in a thick drawl, “Pull that truck on up.”
“Oh, great,” I thought darkly. Aside from suicide bombers, I knew of no one more destructive than certain construction workers.
The restaurant I decided on was a Jewish, vegetarian place where I ended up getting all my meals. It was quite dark upon first entering. The staff was greeting me from a few feet away, but I could not see them because of the dearth of light and my poor vision. I stepped forward uncertainly. I heard them greet me again, but still I did not see them and felt disoriented. Finally, one came up to me and said, “Sit anywhere you like.”
I hated when my poor vision made me seem like a weirdo, which was usual when I was in a new place, so I hated going anywhere new. Going alone to Florida made me anxious. I was eager for the arrival of my brothers Alex and Jack, the following day.
That night moonlight was sparkling on the waters channeling around the periphery of the Whitehouse. I left my balcony door open and listened to sound of the water. The feeling was wondrous, like being on another, more peaceful planet.
In the morning I took a cab to my eight o’clock appointment for my initial consultation with Dr. Reed. When I arrived, the door was locked. I knocked and no one answered. I waited for an hour before someone came out of the elevator and proceeded to the door. I said greeted him, but he didn’t respond, or maybe he did quietly and my eyesight prevented me from seeing his response. I followed him in and sat down in the reception area.
Shortly, Dr. Reed came out and said with some annoyance, “Amy, you have come too early. We’re not ready to receive you.”
“But I was told to be here at eight o’clock for my appointment,” I replied.
Dr. Reed checked this out on the schedule, saw I was right, apologized and said he would be with me as soon as he could.
In the past five years and particularly in the previous five months I had been treated so negligently by medical staff that I was not surprised by the mix-up.
I was slightly paranoid that Dr. Reed would find some reason to avert the orchiectomy—like other doctors had. On the phone he had asked me how long I had been crossdressing full-time. I was still presenting in public as male. I told him I had been crossdressing every day for a year, but not full-time. “Why not?” he asked.
I said, “I don’t know, uh…well, I do. It’s because…uh…” and went on stammering for a while, looking for a concise way to explain myself, and trying to be brief since I assumed that Dr. Reed was busy because he was a doctor. At the same time, I did not want to sabotage the doctor’s view of me as a candidate for the surgery. I wanted to sound like a person with integrity. I was thinking too many things at once so I finally answered, “I am right now.”
To me, wearing female clothing wasn’t crossdressing anyway. I was a girl. To dress as a boy was crossdressing. All I ever wore as a boy, even in public, was pajamas. I didn’t mention that on the phone to Dr. Reed because I didn’t want to sound loony.
The doctor said, “It doesn’t matter,” and moved on to something else. At any rate, I felt I had failed the phone interview and was anxious about coming off femininely for our consultation so that he would have no reservation about the operation. Consequently, it was a blessing-in-disguise that my appointment had been overlooked, since, after years of such neglectful treatment, I felt I had earned the right to be demanding, and the bitchiness of how this felt helped me come off more femininely than I would have had my appointment been punctually kept.
It appeared I had been overlooked because Dr. Reed’s office was understaffed. It was just him, Ann and Frank (actual names).
Since I was feeling a bit hostile, the comfort in Dr. Reed’s waiting room seemed to insincerely lure patients into a sense that their gender struggles were understood there and would be worked out. The chairs, seats, and sofas were plush, aristocratic and a bit Victorian. The room was lit by a huge, faux skylight.
Large paintings of feminine scenes, in gilded frames, were hung. The largest showed little, twin girls with neat, red hair, wearing identical blue dresses. One of them was sitting on the back of the family dog, which was several times her size. His expression seemed to say that he bore her weight dutifully.
The girls were looking at their mother. She was in a black gown, reclining on a chaise lounge, and smiling pleasantly. Though the painting was masterfully executed, my mood made the girls seem bratty and the woman stupid, like objects of sentimentalized fantasy, for which I had zero sympathy.
I could hear Dr. Reed conversing with Ann and Frank about me, referring to me with masculine pronouns, which made me feel bitter and abnormal. Perhaps I had to expect that since I was presenting as male, except for women’s jeans. However, once I was admitted through the waiting room door I was addressed as a woman.
It was quite amazing how different I felt and behaved when people acceptingly acknowledged me as female. My posture, gestures and movement became composed and graceful. My voice changed, too, and Dr. Reed even complimented me on its “register,” which was validating, and even nourishing. It was as if I existed to him.
Outside of the Reed Centre I had little existence to anyone compared to how much people normally existed to others. I had not a meaningful social relationship in eight years.
Dr. Reed asked me if I had any questions about the procedure. “Yes,” I answered, “…but I’m not remembering them…”
“Take as much time as you need,” he said, “We kept you waiting for an hour.”
One question came to me. It was about the suture. He said it would dissolve in two weeks.
I paused, and said, “I guess that’s it.”
“Great, Amy. Let’s go to the examination room so I can look you over.”
Once inside, the doctor said, “I’d like you to take everything off, including your panties.”
Ann came in and stood by the door. “She has beautiful skin, doesn’t she?” Dr. Reed noted.
“Yes, she does,” replied Ann.
“Thank you,” I said humbly. I felt special.
Afterward, as I was dressing, Ann cleaned the examination table off with alcohol. The center was immaculate. The main hallway was white marble, and the bathroom was done in black marble. It was a center for sexual reassignment, but also felt like a well-kept temple.
Back in Dr. Reed’s office, I remembered my second question, about painkillers. “Thank you for reminding me, Amy,” said Dr. Reed.
It seemed the doctor had way too much to do. I was certain, from things he had told me over the phone, that he spent nights in the centre to look after the women recovering there from their SRS (sexual reassignment surgery).
Dr. Reed was a bit past middle-age, but his face was youthful, perhaps because of surgery. In his demeanor and the deftness of his movements, I perceived that he was the master of every detail of the center. He moved around in it as seamlessly as a spirit. Because it was a new place to me, I moved from chamber to chamber uncertainly, like a rock on practiced legs. In contrast, when my body was stationary—seated or lying on the examination table--my femininity gently snaked out.
Dr. Reed asked me what I did. I replied that I was a writer. “What do you write?” he asked.
“I’m working on a long memoir, but I also write children’s stories and essays; all kinds of things.”
“Have you ever been published?”
“A couple times.” Since it was plain that I couldn’t pay for my surgery just from being published a couple times, I admitted, “My parents are paying for the surgery. I think they feel sorry for me.”
“Parents. Isn’t it great to have parents?” said Dr. Reed nostalgically, “All the times they met me at the airport…”
“Amy, I really like you,” said Dr. Reed, “When you come back for your SRS, we’ll do something special for you.” I felt that he was saying this because he felt guilty for making me wait so long, but he repeated it every time we met over the next couple of days.
For our initial correspondence, Dr. Reed had written unusually cordial e-mails. In person, he treated me fondly, and called me “sweetheart” and “darling.” I wanted to let his endearments touch me. I was tired of how rarely kindness interrupted my ongoing isolation. I loved kindness when it was sincere, but I was unsure about the dimensions of sincerity in a medical relationship such as ours.
~~~
After the surgery, while I was in the recovery room, my brother Alex told me that all the paintings in the office were signed “Reed.” When Dr. Reed came in Alex asked him if he was the Reed who had done them. “Yes,” he answered shortly, and attended to something else, apologizing that things were “a bit high-strung.”
My whole perception of Dr. Reed then shifted entirely so that I thought of him as an artist who honored women more than being doctorly allowed him to reveal. Then, I was certain I was genuinely cared for. Alex wondered what the doctor’s story was. I did, too. There was no time to ask.
The painting in the reception area of the girls, woman and dog, and especially the cutesiness of the girl sitting on the dog, had seemed so superficial at first, but as the work of Dr. Reed’s hand it seemed marvelous.
I could relate to the dog from the times when I dutifully accepted myself, letting the feminine preside atop me. I was becoming less like the dog and more like the girl seated on it.
The cuteness of the feminine was sharp, and the cuteness of the masculine was clownishly impotent. Perhaps girls liked “cute guys” because of the impotence characteristic of women in a world of men who seemed the most potent when tearing into the flesh with knives, bullets and/or penises.
In the recovery room, on the other side of a curtain, an older woman named Maggie was recovering from SRS performed the day before. She was large, ate rather loudly and grunted. Perhaps she couldn’t help being noisy because of the after-effects of the procedure.
Maggie called on Ann to help her go to the bathroom. Fretting that she would miss the bedpan, Maggie told Ann helplessly, “I have no penis.”
To Maggie’s pleasure and surprise she didn’t miss the bedpan, but she also sensed she had pooped when passing the urine. Ann didn’t want to believe this, but Maggie insisted it was true.
My brother Alex said that he saw Ann pull Maggie’s cheeks apart to take a look, but not too far. Ann said, “Honey, it’s all right. You just passed some gas.”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Maggie. I wanted to wish her good luck when we left, but it seemed like an imposition so I didn’t.
~~~
When my brothers and I first arrived for the surgery I was not nervous at all. Alex seemed a little edgy. Jack was as stony as ever. I felt safe and protected to have them near.
After I was admitted, Ann gave me a bunch of directions about where to go, and about changing into the gown. I hesitated, going over them in my mind for fear that I would do something wrong. She repeated them and I walked down the hall, trying to guess what to do next. “Go right, right there,” she called.
I pointed to a doorway. “Yes,” she said.
In an antechamber to a bathroom there were some lockers where I was supposed to leave my clothes. Inside my locker I expected to find the gown, but there was none. Frank ducked in and asked, “Do you have a gown?”
“No,” I said.
“There it is,” he said pointing into the bathroom. The bathroom was clean and shiny. The floor was smooth on my bare feet. There were no little flecks of crud on it like on ordinary floors.
After I changed, Frank led me to the operating room. It was like being home. I belonged there. It was mine. Around the table there was a lot of space. I would have danced had there been no tasks. I put my tender butt up onto the table and laid out.
As Frank got me prepped, a beep-beep-beep sound started up in the room. “What’s that sound?” I asked.
“That’s your heart,” said Frank.
~~~
I was gazing with interest at the oversized, overhead light fixtures mounted over the operating table when Dr. Reed came in and greeted me. “Hi,” I answered pensively.
“Are you ready for this, Amy?” asked the doctor.
“Yes, I am,” I replied with sweet enthusiasm. Frank laughed a little.
Dr. Reed set up intravenous sedation and secured my arm in place with a Velcro strap. He said, “This is so you don’t try to help us with operation.” I laughed.
“This is going to pinch,” said Dr. Reed as he readied the Novocain.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“We have to get it deep into the nerve,” he said.
“Thanks for warning me.”
A cool drop seeped out from the syringe and fell onto my genitals, rolling sensually down between scrotum and thigh. It felt nice. Then the needle went in. “Ooh, ow,” I said wincing and sucking in air.
“It’s okay to emote, Amy. It let’s us know how you are doing.”
“Okay. I’m not a tough guy,” I said.
After a bunch of shots Dr. Reed asked, “Can you feel this?” and nicked my penis with a blade. I answered no and he went to work. All I felt was some pulling. The sedative was making me quite euphoric.
A fourth person came into the room. Dr. Reed called him “Lyle.” Lyle was from a company that was paying me $500 for my testicles. They would be used for research on how cell division related to aging. Since aging begins when cell division stops, the theory was, apparently, that if cell division could be enhanced, aging would slow.
I knew when each testicle had been removed because Dr. Reed would take it over to Lyle. After the second one, Lyle went away. The whole time Lyle stood off to the side, and I never once glimpsed him.
“What’s that funny smell?” I asked Dr. Reed.
“It’s the cautery,” he answered, “for your tubes.”
“I didn’t realize you were going to cauterize me. I thought you were going to stitch me.”
“We cut them high so that we don’t leave a Tootsie Roll behind.”
“That’s good.”
~~~
After recovery, as Frank was pushing me down the white marble hallway in a wheelchair, Dr. Reed was smiling to me. I was smiling back. The doctor cupped the back of my head in his hand and he told me goodbye.
I was scheduled to return in two days to have the dressing removed. In the meantime, I was limited to bed-rest. Alex and Jack, but mostly Alex, took good care of me with fresh icepacks for the swelling and food from the Jewish-vegetarian place. Once, Alex shooed away housekeeping, saying, “She’s sleeping.”
It was amazing how my confidence as a girl swelled just from polite interaction with Dr. Reed and his staff. The operation itself helped in that it augmented my right to be myself. With Alex and Jack my voice sometimes came out female. It never had before in front of any family member because it was my instinct to accommodate people’s expectations of me in order to avoid making them feel uncomfortable. When I made people uncomfortable I felt uncomfortable. The simplest solution had been to keep up male appearances and stay miserable in my pajamas.
Alex suggested that we have a funeral for “George,” my name when I was male. I thought it was a good idea. We hoped it would help my transition, but weren’t sure what our parents would think of it.
After the Novocain wore off I was sore. I moved slowly and gingerly. I slept a lot. When I was awake I felt blissful and at peace in a way that had never been possible before. In my dreams angels were singing from a future world that was aware of itself. I awoke from them as Amy with winsome, modest erections. (In a few days, I discovered I was still orgasmic.)
~~~
I went back to Dr, Reed’s to have the dressing changed, but, instead, he wanted to have it removed, and to see that everything was okay. Ann pulled it off very gently so as not to cause me pain by yanking out hairs. As she proceeded, she was saying, “Oh, oh, I hope that’s okay. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s fine,” I said, but she kept fretting. I revealed that I had shaved before the surgery so there was no hair to tear out.
“You did a good job,” she said, “Usually when people shave themselves, it’s a mess. You do have good skin.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s much nicer than mine.”
“Ohhh,” I intoned modestly, lowering my head.
After she was done and the dressing was off I sat up to look. “Yep, they’re gone,” she said. I was quite amazed at what was still there; a nice purple bruise, an inch-long, suture down the center and the scrotum was moist and bunched up from the confinement. It felt like labia.
Dr. Reed joined us, neatened up the suture and then he and Ann cleaned the gunky adhesive off of me. It was like being a baby, and that felt nice. I hoped I would feel that again someday.
As I was leaving Dr. Reed held out his hand for me to shake, and I opened my arms to hug. I often hugged people with my hands closed, but they were open. I released the hug, but he didn’t. He kept holding me till it was more real than polite. I didn’t like having to leave behind things that felt real, and felt clumsy as I moved away, toward the door. Since I had been cut into reality at the doctor’s center, it was a very real place to me. Part of me wanted to stay and be operated on more.
The sense of purposefulness I had come to Miami with was fading. The Florida sun clouded over. Alex left early in the morning. Jack and I had to check out of the Whitehouse by eleven and our airport shuttle bus wasn’t coming till three. In the meantime, we gorged ourselves in the Jewish-vegetarian restaurant and then went to a park to edit a sample from my memoirs. Jack had become an adept editor. He said that when he was editing he went into a trance.
As he was going through my work, he noted that something was missing in the clownishness, brokenness, and rage of my character. “Why aren’t you more of a man?” he asked of the person I had been twelve years before.
I explained that at the time, I was a man in my clownishness and rage, and my femininity was shameful so I kept it tightly guarded, even from myself, so that I couldn’t even feel it. “That’s what’s missing,” he said.
I felt as if I was speaking to Jack from the self that had been tightly guarded, that was there all along, waiting for the opportunity to save me, as if I was becoming Amy before Jack’s eyes.
~~~
Dad met me at the airport in Boston. He was smiling and said, “Hi, Amy.” It was the first time I had heard him call me that.
I gave him a big, openhanded hug, like the one I’d had with Dr. Reed, and said, “Thank you, Daddy.”
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