Adventures in Deconstruction – Mary Bryson
Field Notes From a Cancer Battle Ground Where Queer Life Meets Precarious Life Head On
Mary K. Bryson
Vancouver, British-Columbia
June 30, 2007
Dancing on Knife’s Edge
I have wondered how to start this blog. Just thinking about writing my cancer onto the screen is way too real.
I have been living with a breast cancer diagnosis for three short weeks – days that have been filled to bursting with specialist appointments, blood tests, MRI, and hundreds of desperate and sometimes awkward conversations with friends and family. And I have cried. I have never cried so much as I have over the past 21 days. Buckets. I never know when the tears will start.
The beginning of this story probably involves a minimum of three combustive elements: queer love, a tattoo and cancer. I could start this account 17 years ago, when I had fallen desperately in love with a woman called Ange. She seemed like a heroic figure to me at the time. When I met her, Ange had just been through surgery for colon cancer. She had “the bag”. And she had a poster on her bedroom wall of an Amazonian woman with an amazing floral tattoo that wound its way across her double mastectomy scar. Ange died of cancer about six months after getting the all-clear from a doctor at the B.C. Cancer Agency. And now, today, I am quietly waiting for my own bilateral mastectomy (double) which is scheduled for the day after the day after tomorrow. And the tattoo that I have so proudly sported for the past seventeen years – a floral wreath that winds its way across my breasts in Ange’s honour – will itself be severed, and distorted; brutally cut short, just like my love of Ange.
I wanted to start this blog right away – back then – in the early days – but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t have the energy or perhaps, the courage. So this first entry will be a retrospective on the first three weeks.
June 8 – a mere three weeks ago – I got the call from my doctor with the results of my core biopsy. I was sitting in the Edmonton airport, waiting to fly back to Vancouver after having done a couple of really good research interviews. I am working on a project where I am looking at media, sexuality, communities and knowledge. When I saw my doctor’s name flash across the call display I knew before I even clicked the little green button that the news wasn’t good. After all, why phone me with good news? “Are you sitting down?” she ventured. My doctor told me that the biopsy of the right breast had revealed DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ). “We’ve found it very early,” she exclaimed buoyantly, “and it’s totally curable. 100%” She then told me that she was heading out of town herself, but that she had set up an appointment with a surgeon. I remember that I couldn’t hear the surgeon’s name, and that I was utterly at a loss for words. I couldn’t metabolize the information at all.
It was a Friday, which meant that I couldn’t get into the doctor’s office until Monday to read the radiologist’s report on the biopsy. So I read whatever I could get my hands on about DCIS. Monday, I knew what to look for in the report. And when I finally got to see the report, I couldn’t fathom the intention of my doctor’s good cheer. The DCIS was multi-focal, grade 3 comedocarcinoma, and with a focus of microinvasion. Not good. But my doctor wasn’t around, and the next step was to get in touch with the surgeon, and to see what I could find out about her.
Dr. C works at VGH and is an oncological surgeon. So far so good. I found published papers she had authored. I didn’t find anything awful, although I am not sure what I was expecting to find. When I called Dr. C’s office, her secretary set up an appointment the very next day. I was just four days post-biopsy news, and heading into the oncological surgery floor of a major hospital. I didn’t take that as a very reassuring sign although, of course, I was also really grateful.
Dr. C’s office manner was a breath of fresh air for me. She took one look at my page crammed with notes and questions, and asked me what I thought about the situation. I remember thinking, “Wow. How novel. A doctor who wants to know what I think before even giving me her opinion.” So I ventured forth with my impression of the biopsy report, outlined my family history of bilateral breast cancer, and ended with the notion that I would probably be more comforted with a simple mastectomy of the right breast than a lumpectomy, despite the equivalent survival rates, because the fear of recurrence would likely prove untenable for me. My presentation felt oddly clinical – like I was an extra on House who had just nervously stumbled her way through a case presentation during Rounds. I thought Dr. C would vigorously disagree. After all, how hopelessly old fashioned of me to suggest a mastectomy for DCIS when I could opt for lumpectomy and radiation – or what we call, “breast conserving” treatment. But instead of trying to persuade me to keep my right breast, Dr. C steered us right down the path of deciding the fate of the left breast, and about 60 seconds later, I had settled on a bilateral mastectomy. There wasn’t a whole lot left to talk about at that point, save for a discussion of the sentinal node biopsy – a technique for testing the cancer status of the lymph node closest to the cancer and that is designed to reduce the risk of unnecessary lymph node removal. Then came the date for the surgery. July 3. 3 days from today.
I don’t know how to accommodate to the fact that I have cancer, nor to the fact that in three days, my breasts will be removed. Some days, the loss of my breasts seems like the really bad thing that I have to somehow get used to. And then, cruelly, comes the realization that after all, what’s the loss of breasts in comparison to the very real possibility of metastatic cancer?
July 7, 2007
Living in Prognosis
It’s amazing to read something that seems to speak directly to you when you are in the grip of an extraordinary trauma. I can imagine getting really flaky, which I could not have envisaged pre-cancer. Yesterday my friend Stuart gave me a paper by Sarah Jain called “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegaic Politics” (Representations, Spring, 2007). It’s a funny thing, coincidence. I met Sarah Jain last year, having exchanged articles by email sight unseen, as folks commonly do these days. And then I discovered that another new email friend, Kris, from the University of Chicago, knew Sarah Jain, as does Stuart. How odd is that? And now this incredibly smart woman who teaches at Stanford and whose work I have been getting to know is writing about uncertainty, risk, discourses of temporality and breast cancer. Wow. I am almost ready to start talking about angels.
Everyone wants to know when I will get my pathology report and it concerns them greatly that (a) I am not sure, and (b) I don’t seem to be motivated enough about reading the analysis of the evidence from the diagnostic work on the breasts following the mastectomy. These folks who are concerned about my apparently lackadaisical attitude don’t have cancer. Well let me correct that. They are not “living in prognosis” – to use Jain’s elegant formulation. Prognosis is a very inexact set of practices. The reassurance that my well-intentioned friends think will be provided by a set of statements about the tumour and the presence of absence of cancer cells in the two lymph nodes removed in the sentinel node biopsy is actually a pipe dream. In fact, someone working in a lab will look at slices of the breast tissue and the lymph nodes, and provide a set of descriptive statements that, as a collective set of facts, will link up with another set of aggregated probabilities. The relationship between the population statistics and what the pathologist notices, and between these two sets of relations and treatment options – well, it’s just a big huge open field of uncertainty.
Tumour size, single or multi-focal, cells in the lymphs or not, estrogen and/or progesterone positive or not, age on diagnosis, micro-invasion or not — yes they all translate into slots in an actuarial chart — but no, there will be no moment of clarity and comfort in this clinical picture. Chemotherapy yes or no, radiation yes or no, hormone therapy or removal of the ovaries or both. Any and all are possible elements for my treatment and I am rather glad that at this point, today, as I am riding the waves of post-anaesthetic nausea, that there is a lot that I still don’t know.
July 17, 2007
Full Circle, Kind of…
Includes the verse: I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the amazon, the one who shoots arrows.
There was a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart. I started this blog not so very long ago with the story of a woman I loved, and a poster on her wall of a post-mastectomy woman (Deena Metzger) with an amazing tattoo. Well, I found that image today – yes, today – even though I have been looking for it unsuccessfully for weeks. And today I found out from my pathology report, again, unexpectedly, that I am prognostically-speaking, cancer free and that my treatment has come to an end. Yeah I know, it’s really weird. I have not exactly adjusted to the news yet. But it’s amazing and real.
Think about the symmetry here — I get a tattoo on my chest in the late 1980’s to mourn the death from cancer of a woman I loved. I get this tattoo on my chest because of the post-mastectomy tattoo in the poster by Deena Metzger on Ange’s bedroom wall. And then like Deena Metzger, I get breast cancer, and that tattoo gets redrawn. And in the most unlikely turn of events, (a) the surgeon decides to save my tattoo, which looks virtually the same as before my mastectomy, and (b) I get a clean bill of health in the pathology report. And then life starts again. Hope you weren’t sleeping at the wheel. Ha ha.
I had to go to the surgeon’s office five days prior to what was supposed to be the unveiling of the post-surgical pathology report because I have developed a very common complication following a mastectomy – a fluid build-up that the body can’t drain in the space where the left breast was, which is known as a seroma. So, in we go to visit Dr. C and get the seroma aspirated. Back to the scary place at the hospital. The wonderful R, Dr C’s nurse, mentioned quite casually when we arrived that she had received the pathology report and so would be cancelling the planned follow-up on Friday. YIKES. I had kind of anticipated that the report might be there and so had figured out a preliminary set of questions for Dr C — questions about chemotherapy, radiation and hormone therapy — but I SO wasn’t actually ready to hear the news.
Ready or not, there was Dr C and in we went. She had the report in her hand and I can’t likely ever adequately convey the state of stark dread with which I was anticipating the information about the post-mastectomy pathology. “Well it doesn’t get any better than this.” is how Dr C began the conversation.
The pathology report was as follows: No invasive cancer beyond the DCIS in the ducts. No cancerous cells in the lymphs that had been removed for the sentinel node biopsy. Clear margins.
The bottom line from this kind of report is that any systemic treatment would have a higher probability of causing harm than the probability of stray cells going metastatic. End of treatment.
My reaction to all this has been disbelief and disorientation. I had so thoroughly prepared myself for systemic treatment that I am not sure how to reorient myself to no treatment at all. That’s ok. It probably is totally predictable.
I will have to keep going back to the surgeon’s office to get the seroma aspirated until it stops filling up again. But apart from that, I can now get on with the business of recreating my life, again.
I will have more to say about all this, but I wanted to post something as soon as I heard to get the word out. I don’t quite know how to thank all of you for your support. So for now, let me just say that I am incredibly moved and very grateful. You have been very kind and very courageous to step into this awful place with me and hold my hand.
July 22, 2007
Dumb Fairy Tales and other Discourses of Femininity
I now look at myself every morning, every evening, naked, in the mirror, equanimously, as I always did, and what I see is not a maimed body. Some might call this denial. Yet – I look at this flat expanse of my chest and I do not find it ugly, or repellent. My face, somehow, “goes” with this chest, there is a harmonious continuity from my face all the way down my body. There is, in all human beings, when they are bare-chested, a touching symmetry between the eyes and the nipples, and this symmetry, of course, in my case, is gone. Yet, and this may sound scandalous, absurd, or even mad: this breast-less body is not devoid, in my eyes, of a certain pure and abstracted beauty. If it is indeed monstrous, it is so in the manner of some magical, not quite human creature – a fairy, a mermaid – an Amazon. Anne-Marie de Grazia
Likely you know the fairy tale of The Princess and the Pea. A prince is looking for a bride. A woman appears at the gate of his castle who claims to be the real deal but she looks, well, pretty disheveled. Old ma knows how to tell the difference, and so places a pea under the pretending princess’ twenty mattress bed. When the parvenu wakes up she whines incessantly about having slept so poorly because there was something amiss with the bed and BINGO everyone knows she’s the real deal. The prince marries his newly authenticated bride. The pea is put in a museum.
As a child, I felt deeply ambivalent about this story. The fetishization, in women, of useless knowledge seems to me epitomized by the positive spin placed on the princess’ ability to find the pea. And when the possession of that useless knowledge is the litmus test for jubilant heterosexuality, well, then its existence, let alone cultivation, is most assuredly far from innocent.
How then, to feel about the fact that it is now my task, imposed by the medical establishment, to effect local control of a breast cancer recurrence by finding the pea. “When it comes back” my surgeon explained patiently, the other day, “it almost always feels like a pea.” Keeping track of the pea is not a new job for me. My family tree is chock-a-block with breast cancer, which is why I have been dutifully going for yearly mammograms since the age of 42.
Little did I know that mammograms are a very unreliable method for tracking early breast cancer in women under the age of 50, and that this lack of accuracy is even more pronounced for women with what are known as “dense breasts” – small, prone to cysts… After all, I had a “good” mammogram just ten months before my cancer was diagnosed. It had been missed the time before. It is also the case that I did not know that MRI’s are considered by some to be a much more reliable tool for detecting early breast cancer in women under 50.
I wonder about how my chances of finding that pea would be affected by reconstruction. There is a lot of pressure on women to undergo reconstruction after a mastectomy. Audre Lorde talks about this phenomenon in her Cancer Journal. When I went to visit my GP about a week prior to my double mastectomy, she asked me which surgeon was going to do my reconstruction. She guffawed when I told her that I had decided against reconstruction. “You’re in denial” she proclaimed. “I am going to sign you up. The waiting list is two years anyway. By then, you’ll be more than ready.”
Oncological research appears to indicate no impact of reconstruction on detection of recurrence. But there is a clear set of normative assumptions at work in this research, which go something like this: (1) breasts constitute a vital marker of femininity, (2) women will benefit from the restoration, post-mastectomy, of their “spoiled identity” (E. Goffman) and therefore (3) reconstruction should be made widely available to all women undergoing mastectomy.
This is what the official story regarding reconstruction and mastectomy sounds like:
“Deciding on Mastectomy Making the decision to have a mastectomy can be very difficult. It can be hard to imagine living without your breast, and you may feel like your identity or femininity is being threatened. The procedure can often be made easier by having breast reconstruction after mastectomy. This helps to reshape your breast and reduce any disfigurement, and may help you to feel more comfortable choosing mastectomy. Ask you health care provider for more information about this option.”
No where in all of this research are the side effects and complications of reconstruction clearly delineated. Reconstruction surgery involves an initial long and very painful operation followed by several additional surgical procedures. The impression of breasts is created either by means of implants or the use of a woman’s own tissue (abdominal) which is relocated to the chest area.
So what is the medical establishment’s priorities in relation to breast health, cancer, and morbidity amongst women? Clearly, millions, if not billions of dollars is going to the improvement and funding of breast reconstruction. And it is equally obvious that virtually no money is being directed to programs that would improve the reliability of cancer detection in populations at-risk of mammogram failure. Whose job is it, actually, to find that pea? How terribly convenient for medical discourse inappropriately to relocate responsibility to women to find that pea, and in so doing, exaggerate the agency possessed by individual women in determining the likelihood of survival in relation to early stage breast cancer.
What a different world it would be if we decided to spend all of the breast cancer research dollars on the (a) identification (and elimination) of the actual causes of breast cancer, (b) widespread availability of accurate methods of early detection, (c) appropriate methods to deal with post-surgical complications (e.g., lymphedema, which is very common and extraordinarily challenging), and of course, (d) a cure for cancers of all kinds. Hallelujah!
August 23, 2007
Breastless in Vancouver, and You?
So yesterday, at the breast/onco surgeon’s, the resident comes in first, to prep me before the big cheese herself. When she prepares to do the examination of my incisions, she says, “Let’s have a look at your breasts…” “I mean” she continues, having clearly funbled the ball, “Where your breasts used to be.” WOW. Talk about a shitty save. I can’t believe she said that. No matter how good I feel about my mastectomy, to be defined entirely by lack in such an explicit way really sucks.
My biggest challenge today was when the manicurist asked me, “What shape do you like your nails?”. Yikes. This is not something I have ever spent even 2 seconds thinking about. I stared at her rather intently, hoping for clues, and then rather awkwardly confessed that, “I don’t think I have a favorite shape”. I knew that was the wrong answer. It was like being back in school. She wrote me off. I tried to recuperate my girl points by commenting on her highlights, but it was in vain. It was probably even worse than if I had just let it die quietly on the vine.
She did spend rather a long time trying to figure out why my chest was so totally flat. But looking would not yield an answer to her curiosity. I have seen this look, now, many times. When I catch people looking, they are scanning from the chest to the face and back again. I guess they are trying to figure it out. Hmmmmm. Looks like a woman’s face, but no boobs. So they look at the face again, maybe the buzz-cut short hair is another distractor, then back down to the washboard chest.
I spend countless time here and there scanning the crowd for boob-less chests myself, I must now confess. I want to see more people who look like me. I feel lonely in my state of exception. I keep hoping that I will look out into the crowd at the mall and see an obviously breast-less chest like mine, thrust proudly forward into the flow of life. But I don’t — EVER. In the Cancer Journal, Audrey Lorde talks about the politics of visibility of walking in the world, breast-less. Lorde is very passionate about the politics of visibility for the breast-less and excoriates those who would foist prosthetics or reconstruction on mastectomy patients.
I have no interest in being critical of anyone else’s choices. But I would like more visibility for those of us who travel the world without breasts. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Send me a picture of yourself. Tell me how it is, for you. Maybe we should start a Facebook group. Or make t–shirts.
September 9, 2007
Born to Be Alive: Drag King, Tantric Sex, and White T-Shirt Contest
Okay, so for an audio track to listen to while reading this post, go grab this on for size: Patrick Hernandez, the one and only original Disco Queen, and Born to Be Alive crooner. If you are observant, and have laid eyes on me in the last three months, you will notice that finally, Mary is BLOND again. YAY!!! Months of AC (after cancer) guilt about carcinogenic hair dye stopped me from reaching for the bottle (of bleach). How dull.
This weekend was my first AC BIG social excursion. Unexpectedly, I found myself at the BOLD conference (Bold Old(er) Lesbians). And I say, “unexpectedly” simply because I have a pretty uneasy relationship with the “lesbian” moniker, let alone “old”. Call it internalized homophoboia if it makes you feel better, with maybe a dash of unresolved misogyny and ageism. I wouldn’t deny any of it. Identification is complex ground. I can live with/in/as queer, or even dyke, but the L word just doesn’t work for me, and never has. At any rate, there I was Friday night listening to a panel of amazing women at a literary reading, and it turns out that one of them, Betsy Warland, read from a recent work that features a primary character living in the altered state that results from a bilateral mastectomy. The “never the same” ontological house of mirrors that breast cancer effects is also the theme of Only This Blue, a long essay-poem by the talented Warland. It’s on my pile of things to read this month, quite close to the top, in fact. The pile is substantial!!!
One of the highlights of the conference for me was a performance by drag king troupe, 3 Dollar Bill. After the show, I was hanging around outside the main ballroom, and someone came up to me and asked me if I was a drag king. I have to say that I was incredibly excited by this instance of mistaken identity. I decided it had to be because of my stunningly flat chest, which looked, perhaps, like a really skillful instance of chest binding. Flush with excitement, I practically flew over to my pal J, from Little Sisters bookstore, who was standing in a crowd that included all the guys from 3 Dollar Bill, and breathlessly relayed the anecdote. J quickly suggested that perhaps I should perform my first drag king act at a social event the group had planned for the Xmas season at the Majestic. The “real” kings decided that maybe, I could give it a whirl, and that they might even offer tutoring. My first homework is to choose “my song”. I was given sternly delivered instructions about how important it would be to pick a song that I could really “fill” — as in, “fill the space”. F*ck!.
Earlier in the evening, while innocently perusing the amazing array of desserts, a conference-goer mistook me for the demonstration gal in the Tantric Sex workshop. I am not sure exactly what kind of energy I was giving off last night, but it was good.
I even had my very own first vision of a post-mastectomy-no-reconstruction-honest-to-goodness-dyke at this wonderful conference (yeah, so, I’m a convert). I did my best not to gape, but I really felt like I can only imagine someone might feel who had gotten very lost in the woods for oh, fifty years, only to emerge and experience their first sighting of a fellow human. I drank in her image. I even screwed up the courage to talk to her and get her card. Good for me. I am not always good at stuff like that. Social multi-tasking is definitely not my strong suit.
In honour of her, I took off my sweater to go and dance. I realized the other day that of-late, I have been carefully adjusting my wardrobe so as to avoid the plain solid colour t-shirt directly worn over flat chest. It is, well, just too bold, even for me. I have been wearing a white t-shirt and then another t-shirt over top of that one. Or I have been wearing a white t and a button-up shirt over that. Got the picture? Well buoyed with excitement about my sighting I decided to toss off the 2nd layer of protective armour – the sweater – and go and dance wearing just my light white t-shirt. I felt practically naked. There was no hiding the fact that my chest is completely flat. And I felt GREAT. It was really liberating. While I was dancing my heart out, I discovered my drag king song — Born to be Alive (the one and only and incomparable Patrick Hernandez). It doesn’t get any queerer.
Yeah. I am. Still Here. Queer. And definitely, Alive.
PS> Oh, and about that BOLD conference. (1) Many thanks to community heroes Pat Hogan and Claire Robson for organizing this cultural extravaganza. This kind of work is SO very important. (2) Bold – Yes, Older – Yum, and Lesbian – double Yum.
October 30, 2007
All Clear!
Yesterday was eventful. I went to see Dr. R at Sunnybrook Hospital, in Toronto, for my second opinion dialogue. My wonderful pal and sister-in-law, M, came with me. I have been staying with M and my brother, Tom, for the last couple of days. They have been so incredibly kind and generous as hosts, inviting over friends and family, cooking marathon meals, and generally being the wonderful people they are.
In some significant way, it is M’s own cancer story, or part of it, one really important detail, that may have saved my life. M had pain in her left breast a couple of years ago that prompted her to seek a diagnostic mammogram, only then to learn that she had breast cancer. When I experienced continuous pain in my left breast this past Spring, it was the echo of M’s story that sent me on my own path to my GP seeking a diagnostic mammogram, and finding likewise, cancer in the other breast.
M and I made our way to Sunnybrook Hospital, and to Dr. R’s office in the Cancer Centre. To recap, for the uninitiated, following my surgery, there was a conflict between the cancer diagnosis at time of biopsy (microinvasion) and at the time of pathology analysis following surgery (no invasive cancer). I located, with Dr. R’s assistance, a dedicated breast pathologist who specializes in the kind of cancer that I had (DCIS) and had ALL the slides sent to her for re-analysis – a fresh and highly skilled pair of eyes. Dr. R offered to provide a consultation regarding the whole case once the pathologist had finished her work.
The important facts that emerged from my conversation yesterday with Dr. R are as follows:
-No indication of invasive cancer
-Clear and significant surgical margins (greater than 1 cm)
-Mastectomy was, in fact, my only surgical option because the cancer was not just dispersed (multi-focal) but also existed in two large and separate locations (multi-centric) which removes lumpectomy as an option.
The clinical implication for the findings is that there is no need for any further treatment of any kind, and I don’t even need to pursue any kind of follow-up monitoring.
I really appreciate the effort and commitment demonstrated by Dr. R, who organized the pathology second opinion, and offered to talk to me with no formal referral — just following contact by email. I can’t say clearly enough how wonderful it was to be able, finally, to ask my questions and feel heard.
You have likely participated in some way in my cancer story, if only as a reader of this blog, which has been, for me, a vital way to connect with a social network of folks who offer solace, wit and the critical factor of co-presence. To all of you, I need to say how very grateful I am that you have been strong enough and persistent enough to be part of my life in this strange time. With this new clarity concerning the present – my present body – I feel like I can finally take a big first step away from this grotesque disease that is cancer.
November 28, 2007
The Politics of Aesthetics
When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized, by which some subject becomes the subject of human love, we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all. Judith Butler (2001). “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7 (4): 621-36.
Today I wore boxers. It felt transitively gender appropriate and maybe even, essential, since I was heading off to see the plastic surgeon about chest reconstruction. Recall, that this is the only plastic surgeon in British Columbia who does chest surgery for fTm trans folks AND who does breast reconstruction. This guy, I figured, would get my particularities. But still, I needed the performative insurance boxers might provide. After all, I would need to convince the surgeon that doing chest contouring would be, in my case, an genderqueerly appropriate form of post mastectomy/breast cancer “reconstruction surgery“.
Typically, chest, or “top surgery” is regarded by the medical professionals and the health care system in British Columbia as a form of fTm Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). The rules regarding SRS are archaic and extraordinarily discriminatory towards transgendered folks. They include proscriptive requirements, such as, for example, that a candidate for SRS “pass” successfully for a member of the “opposite sex” for a minimum period of two years PRIOR to approval for surgery and that this successful “passing” be observed and recorded by “qualified professionals”. It is also the case that candidates for SRS need to be interviewed and approved for surgery by two mental health professionals.
Step Two, if we are to think of Step One, as the deliberate selection of the Calvin Kleins, involved filling out copious forms. Dr. B wanted to know such a lot about me. There were 8 pages of questions about my sexual and gender identity in relation to temporality, as in, “Who were you when you were born?” (identification via biology), and “Who would you like to become?” (identification via surgery). I was asked to use the space inside of an empty circle to demarcate, with a single dividing line, just how much of ME was f or m at those two critical times – past and future – actual and virtual. All my circles were covered with lines going every which way, tartan-esque, and sported a lively mix of f and m. It was appropriately messy.
Complete these sentences: Gender Identity. I think of myself as a _____. Ideally, I would like to think of myself as a _____.
I experimented with playful answers, as in: How did others perceive your gender identity as a child? Answer: Simplistically. How do others perceive your gender identity now? Answer: Generously.
Step Three was the live interview with Dr. B, who was intelligent, informative and kind. Dr. B is a really stunning example of ethical medical sensibilities. He was emphatic about wanting to use respectful language in asking me about “personal aspects” of my life, and encouraged me to correct him if he went astray. Dr. B didn’t read my answers on the forms. That impressed me. He just chatted away and asked lots of questions. Medical protocol requires doctors to establish that patients seeking any form of SRS actually, seriously want surgery based on what is called, in transgender health discourse, the test of Real Life Experience (RLE). And so the performative criterion becomes, Can I establish that I have a stable and longstanding record of making successful choices in the world that are recognizable and public actions which would pass as Otherly gendered?
I knew that many of the queries were quite important to get right, no matter how casual they may have appeared, like, “Would your ideal gender identity include male genitalia?” If I sounded like I love being a woman “just the way I am,” including all my womanly parts, I would fail the necessary performance of some stable elements of gender dysphoria that would make wanting a male chest something other than totally pathological. Fortunately, “bottom surgery” (as we trannies call it) is a pretty risky biz, so I made some kind of blisteringly ironic statement about preferring a dick I could slam in a drawer to one that might whither away and drop off my body. It seemed persuasive. And I meant well. “Have you told your parents?” This was a tough question, on all kinds of levels, not the least of which is, “What’s to tell?”. Once again, humour was my friend. Most of the time, I was able to assert my stubborn attachment to a transitive relation to gender — a moving project with no fixed address. I insisted on standing in the space of gender queer, and of living a life that is about playful complexity, rather than having ever inhabited something as apparently simple as a tick box on a form.
We moved on to Step Four, because I passed Step Three. OMG. Who was born of this moment – this institutionalized accomplishment of intelligibility?
Dr. B told me enthusiastically that he would not require me to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, because it seemed like I “had a really stable and healthy identity in relation to my complex gender”. And so I learned about the various options for my chest reconstruction, which include several variations, from fixing the problems residual to the bilateral mastectomy, to a full chest contouring operation. I have lots to think about. At the end of today, I was fixated on two thoughts:
If I had been talking about using reconstruction to get a 36DD chest, I would not have been required to disclose whether I felt like I had been born, secretly, as Dolly Parton, and now needed surgery to correct a lack of fit between the inside feeling and the outward appearance.
Maybe everyone should have to read Foucault as a right of passage into adulthood, and yearly thereafter. There might even have to be a test.
I am left with enormous respect for a doctor who has learned so very much about how to care under conditions of institutionalization, uncertainty and risk. I am, also, so very proud that I found within myself the courage to insist on speaking truth to power about a kind of complexity of intelligibility for which there are so very many punishments, sanctions and harsh measures.
December 26, 2007
Mary’s Christmas Queer
I had an amazing Christmas yesterday, and you helped to make it so utterly memorable. It wasn’t about the gifts. Janice and I decided to skip that part of Christmas this year. There wasn’t any overwhelming reason. It wasn’t about anything worthy or principled. We just didn’t feel like piles of presents. What we felt like, was celebration. The very fact that enough psychic space has been cleared in my life so as to permit celebration is attributable directly to the support and overwhelmingly generous love and social connection that so many of you have shared with me. No one knows what to do in the face of cancer. I didn’t have a f*cking clue. And you somehow, against all odds, found the courage and the insight to step into the void, beside me.
So last night, on Christmas, celebrate, we did. Lots of people who I love came to our house for “A Little Christmas Queer”. And please don’t think ‘queer’ is about the sex/gender of who folks cozy up to. It’s just about affirming a principle of kinship that is other than blood ties. And of course, many people who I really wanted to celebrate with DID have family things happening that were good and wonderful, and so couldn’t be celebrating with us last night. So it was far from the whole queer family. But maybe that’s all there ever is anyway — that particular queer family, that night, in that place, and f*ck the idea that there is ever a “whole” anything. What I do know for sure is that there was a lot of love in our house last evening and also, that all my research into how to cook the perfect turkey sure did pay off. Some things should not be an ‘adventure in deconstruction’ and a turkey, perhaps, is one such entity. Although even this claim seems quite suspect.
Yesterday, the bag of breast cancer books that has been a fixture in the living room finally got moved to the back room. It’s almost out the door. I haven’t consulted one of those books for weeks, and the last of the stray volumes that were, up until recently, strewn about the house, was collected up and deposited in the bag.
Loki the super-dog cozied up to everyone, and saved a very special kiss for one of her (many) one-true-loves. Somehow, she manages to find space on the couch for the great dane self, even when there isn’t any. If ever there was a postmodern mathematician with a very post-structural theory of space, it would be Loki.
I started this blog with a story about queer love, a tattoo, and a poster on Ange’s wall that inspired me so many years ago. Last night, P, who knew Ange for many years, brought me that very poster – the very poster of the Deena Metzger photograph that I had spent so many hours staring at on Ange’s wall. After Ange died, P had been guardian of the Metzger poster. P’s generosity in passing on the poster to me is extraordinary. Ange’s poster now sits on my kitchen table, leaning against the wall. I had forgotten that there is a verse of Metzger’s poem on the poster. I was inspired by Metzger’s beauty and courage back then, as I saw it embodied by Ange in her own struggles with cancer. And now, it reanimates my own life. As you do.
Thank you so very much for walking with me, this year, in the most ghastly places that we have had to inhabit. Your courage and kindness have inspired me, and kept me company. I will leave the last word to Metzger.
I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the amazon, the one who shoots arrows.
There was a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart.
Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears.
What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing.
I have relinquished some of the scars.
I have designed my chest with the care given to an illuminated manuscript.
I am no longer ashamed to make love. Love is a battle I can win. I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound.
On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree.
January 8, 2008
Say Hello, Say Goodbye
I think we’re done, here. How’s that for an ambivalent ending?
I hate endings. I hate saying, “Good bye”.
I am back at work, and my mind has been relentlessly elsewhere than on breast cancer. I had thought that by changing the name of the blog, from “Big Grrls DO Cry” to “Adventures in Deconstruction”, that I could shift the emphasis of the blog from cancer, to the politics of everyday life as a breast cancer survivor. And who knows, I may do that some day. But for now, I think that I need, definitively, to step away from cancer as a site of cultural production and analysis.
I want to thank you, for being here. If I know something that might be helpful, I will gladly pass it on. That function has been just one of the joys of maintaining this blog. What can I say? I am compulsively attached to some kind of idea of the Internet as a viral knowledge network that really does make a critical difference to lives where agency is imperiled. And sure as donuts at Tim Hortons, breast cancer and its attendant social/medical institutions, imperil one’s core sense of freedom, identity, value and viability.
Presence. It’s all we are, and all we have.
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Mary K. Bryson is Professor, Faculty of Education and Director, Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, UBC. Mary Bryson’s program of research is designed so as to advance knowledge concerning the social, cultural and educational significance of new media and in so doing, to make significant contributions to theoretical accounts of gendered and sexual marginality. She has numerous publications on theoretical treatments of gender and technology, queer theory, and equity in education, including Radical Inventions (SUNY Press). In 2000, Bryson was a recipient of the Canadian Pioneer in New Technologies and Media award. Her current SSHRC research, “Queer Women on the Net,” is focused on new media, identifications, and discursive emplotments of network formation, community and agency. http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson
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