When I started electrolysis, I made a few entries in my Google calendar to remind myself of my progress. This one popped up today: 3 years of electrolysis (please let it be over).

Ha ha. Let it be over, indeed. It’s nowhere close to over, but that shows what my expectations were when I started (and how I felt before I learned to cope with the pain). I mentioned recently that I would begin to two-hour sessions, and I have. I’ve done two of them, and they aren’t as bad as I expected. When I was doing an hour, I always knew when 55 minutes had passed because I felt I couldn’t take anymore.

It turns out I can take more. Maybe it’s just how our minds work. If I know I’m only lying there for an hour, I can feel when that hour is almost up and allow myself to feel like I’m done. But lying down for a two-hour session, my mind says, okay, now we’re going to hang in longer than before. I don’t know.

But the first two haven’t been bad, mainly because my electrologist and I have talked the whole time. When you can have a conversation, it’s distracting, and the time goes by more quickly. I can only speak because she hasn’t worked much on my lips during the two-hour sessions. When she is working on my lips, I can’t really talk because I don’t want to throw off her aim when she’s hovering over my face with an electric needle.

But in a way, the two-hour sessions are kind of my salvation. Or my hope, anyway. A year of work with one-hour sessions will be done in six months, making that far-off-in-the-distance finish line a little bit closer. (I know the math is obvious, but I have a flair for the obvious.)

In other trans news, my latest blood test showed an extremely high measure of estrogen in my blood. Too high, according to my doctor, so I’m on a lower dose now. I was reluctant to go down since it took so long to get to higher doses, but there are a lot of unpleasant things that can happen when you get too much estrogen, so here I am, dutifully taking 25% less.

He reduced my testosterone blocker a while back, cut it in half because it was affecting my kidney function. So now I’m on half of that, but my testosterone levels are still essentially zero(ish), so that’s all good.

It’s a balancing act, and these minor adjustments take forever, but the alternative is awful, so I (like all trans folks) stay the course. Me and Ronald Regan. He repeated the phrase, “stay the course,” over and over when everyone was afraid that his economic policies were causing a recession. He kept repeating it up to the election, which worked out okay for him. Regan was the beginning (or maybe Nixon was), and now we’re here with a certifiable lunatic cult leader running that political party like a Scientology “org.”

Harris-Walz is all I can say. We donated to her campaign, so my Harris for President t-shirt is on the way. Ayin doesn’t want me to wear it in case one of my “patriot” neighbors does me in for daring to disagree with the Reich. I don’t really think that will happen, but no one ever sees the Brownshirts coming, I suppose.

Thankfully, an increasingly large part of the country is saying Harris-Walz with me. If Harris doesn’t win, all this fuss about hormone replacement therapy could become a moot point when the Red Army comes through town to lynch all the doctors providing trans care.

But that won’t happen, will it.

Will it?

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN