Shortly after I turned fifty, I started to perspire. It wasn’t the glowy dew that I had produced as a female and it wasn’t the labor-intensive, manly sweat that I like to think comes naturally to a hard-working, macho man who sits behind a desk and types for a living. It started at the top of my head and crept its way down, as if I had slowly stepped into a sauna, head first and then body part by body part, activating sweat glands that I didn’t even know I possessed, until I was left soggy and soaking, my clothes tattooed to my sticky, wet body. It was nature turning a hose on me as if I were some hormone-crazed dog.
This happened whether I was sitting on a blanket in the sun or directly in front of an air-conditioner turned on at full blast. It happened in bed and it happened on the street. It took me a while to realize that not every place I went was mysteriously undergoing random temperature fluctuations. This was internal – my own personal global warming.
The worst thing about these episodes was that they had a scary emotional component that often went with them. This part happened primarily at night, when things are scarier anyway, when I already found myself lying awake for hours wondering what hideous rare disease I was going to die from, how I was going to pay my bills until that time, and what exactly was going to happen to me when the universe stopped expanding and started to fold back in on itself.
As I pondered these things, a new and unfamiliar feeling crept over me – one of imminent dread and doom, as if something were horribly wrong right at that moment and I just didn’t know about it yet. Maybe the universe was folding in on itself already, and it would all get back to where I was before the flesh-eating-mad-cow-avian-flu caught up to me.
Then, within a minute or five, the wave of heat began moving down my body, inch by inch, or sometimes millimeter by millimeter. I could feel it beginning at the roots of my hair, creeping down my face and neck, across my chest, down my stomach and legs, and out the bottoms of my feet. Then it was all over, leaving a trail of sweat, and a resulting chill, in its wake. It was so powerful an experience that, even when I had managed to fall asleep in spite of all the worldly threats out there, it woke me up to lie shivering in my own perspiration.
It took about a week for me to realize what was happening. At work, I complained when the air-conditioning vent in my office was open. I complained when it was closed. It was too hot, it was too cold, it was just right, and none of it was right. How could everyone else be comfortable when my skin was literally drowning, my heart was racing, and I was trapped in this rapid climate change that I couldn’t control or understand?
If my coworkers couldn’t experience what I was going through, at least they could suffer vicariously by listening to me whine. And once I finally realized what it was all about, I felt utterly justified in my complaint. After all, how many men reach across their desk for a stack of papers to use as a fan, come to a sudden “aha” moment, stand up, and announce to their colleagues, “That’s what it is – I’m going through menopause.”
The words came tumbling out of my mouth with a mixture of awe and pride, as if I’d just received notification that I’d won an award – not some Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, but an award that I had actually done something to deserve. It was as if this unexpected physiological phenomenon were a goal that I had personally worked for and finally achieved – a biological personal best.
Perhaps it was the memory of my mother’s pride when I got my first period that made me unashamed to announce to everyone that what had started so many years ago in that bathroom had finally come full circle. Despite all the changes that my body had undergone during transition, it was somehow still in possession of its original operating instructions. I had done it – I had finally ended what I started back in sixth grade. I had finished the world’s longest marathon – the 50k Fertility Fun Run.
At the time, I worked with a bunch of gay guys who had turned self-absorbed whining into an art form, along with some hip young lesbians who would eventually go through womynopause, so they at least took the whole thing in stride. Working side by side with a transsexual person can be a bit of a novelty, so the price they paid for putting up with the odd developments in my life was worth having a good story to tell at home. And the price I paid for working with a bunch of gay guys and young lesbians is that my menopausal symptoms got no sympathy.
In fact, nobody there even knew what I was talking about. My twenty-something officemate eventually procured a fan to put by my desk, but I’m not sure whether she did it to be kind, to make me stop sighing heavily, or to blow the unpleasant stench of my sweating body in another direction.
The irony of the whole thing was that menopause couldn’t have been a better word for my situation. Whatever manhood I actually possessed had been put on hold, as if a giant pause button had been pushed on my life. Some people say that we are humans having a spiritual experience, and others say that we are spirits having a human experience, both of which are very high-minded and ethereal – but they are nothing compared to a man having a female experience. …
(Read the rest of this essay plus many more in Teeny Weenies and Other Short Subjects, available on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and as an e-book at Outskirts Press – and thank you for your support.)
(Editor's Note: Despite the fact that Matt Kailey, one of my closest friends, passed away earlier this year I will continue to republish his writing on MileHighGayGuy.com - as I did when he was alive - as a resource for the gay community to know more about trans people. This post originally appeared on Matt Kailey's award-winning website Tranifesto.com)
