Finding Nevo

by Nevo Zisin

  Leading up to chest surgery I thought I would get super fit. I would eat completely clean, meditate, do yoga and make sure I was the most physically prepared I could possibly be. I didn’t do any of that. Life got in the way. With surgery on the horizon I took off work for a little while and prepared for a few weeks of me-time. I was going to be in hospital for a few days and then I’d be able to come home. I was expecting a huge reliance on my mum and a difficult recovery of about six weeks. At the same time I was also one of the heads of an upcoming Habo camp and had a lot to organise so that I could afford to take some time off after surgery. I’ve never been particularly good at “time off”.

  My surgery was taking place in the same hospital I was born in. People kept saying it was momentous, as if I was having a “rebirth”. But I didn’t feel that way. I hated the idea of marking anything in my transition as a new life – my old life was just as important as this one. On the day of surgery I went to the hospital with my mum and Leila. I was freaking out. I had never been to a hospital outside of my birth and didn’t know what to expect. The most comforting advice I was given was that this was the surgeon’s job. Although it was a huge deal for me, it was just another day of work for him and all the nurses. All I needed to do was show up and they would do the rest. My mind was eased over this thought. The nurse put a dinosaur strap around my arm before putting in an IV. It was the same strap I’ve used for every blood test. I’ve always thought it was cute and seeing something familiar in such an alien space was a small but important comfort. She gave me a gas mask and told me to count back from 10.

  10 … 9 … 8 … 7 …

  Mainstream media loves the “born in the wrong body” narrative. I was not born in the wrong body. I was born in my body. I am not saying that is every trans person’s opinion. It is valid to feel that way. But I do not. I don’t believe there is any way my own body could be wrong, except for the ways society has tried to poison my view. It is as if the only way for people to understand transgender individuals is by emphasising there is something wrong with them. By pathologising these identities we shift focus from society’s issues onto the issue of the individual.

  There was no mistake with my birth. I don’t believe that I should have been assigned male at birth and I don’t believe that I was born a girl either. By identifying as someone who was assigned female at birth, rather than born a girl, I shifted the conversation from me, onto society.

  The only trans people I had ever seen in the media were born a certain gender and became another one. They asserted they were born in the wrong body and that they needed to fix that. There was a time when I believed these things – when I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise who was staring back. I think to a large extent that wasn’t necessarily innate, but rather a learned hatred, from a lifetime of indoctrination. It was only days before my chest surgery where I was able to use the words “breasts”, a word from which I had detached a long time before.

  I wrote a letter to my breasts, to try to encapsulate the deeply complex relationship we’d had:

  To my breasts,

  Firstly, I want to say I’m sorry. I tried really hard to make it work, and I know you did too. But I’m afraid it was just never meant to be. I think we spent a lot of time and effort trying to get along and feeling upset when it didn’t work out, and even though I believe we could have saved a lot of time if we hadn’t tried so hard, I’m glad it happened because I think it’s gotten us to this point where we can part on good terms.

  I really do see you as a friend and I know you never intentionally tried to hurt me. I know it was hard for you to see how much pain I was in as a result of your presence sometimes, but I want you to know it wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could. You got smaller, you even grew some hairs so that maybe I would feel less uncomfortable about you. You cooperated with me when I put you into constricting positions that I’m sure you didn’t enjoy. And I really do appreciate everything you did.

  Honestly, I’ll probably miss you. I think I tried to convince myself for a long time that I wouldn’t and that it would just be easier to hate you, but I’m not sure I can do that any more. I don’t hate you, I respect you, and we’ve been through a lot together. I know it was hard for both of us when we were younger and started getting told to cover up. I know we’ve always been confused as to why we can’t go out in public together. I know that you’ve had your own challenges within yourself, being asymmetrical was hard for you growing up and I know I wasn’t always the most supportive about it.

  I need you to know that I’m not saying goodbye because I don’t love you. I think we’ve just gotten to this point where we need to move on. And I know this is probably hard for you to hear, but I do believe I’ll be happier without you. I also think this will be better for you. You need to be free and I’m just going to keep holding you back and pushing you down. It’s time to separate.

  So please know that I will miss you. And I’ll probably think about you from time to time. And I’m grateful that I had you in my life as long as I did, because you presented me with challenges that made me grow and develop as a person. Good luck for the future, and I hope you can forgive and understand.

  Lots of love and respect,

  Nevo

  When I woke up I wasn’t sure if the surgery was over or not. I felt completely lucid, and looked around the room waiting for someone to notice I was awake. After a little while a nurse told me it was over; I had done a great job. They brought me back to my room where my mum and Leila were waiting. My chest felt tight as it was wrapped up with bandages and a surgical binder. The surgery was a huge success. I read some letters from my friends, watched some TV shows and went to sleep.

  The few days I had in hospital were nice. I wasn’t in any pain and didn’t take any of the painkillers I was offered except Panadol. The nurses woke me up at different intervals to check various things. I had visitors consistently while I was there. I felt loved, inundated with messages of support. People brought food, flowers and USBs filled with things I could watch.

  After a few days I was told I could take a shower. It was time to see my chest for the first time. My hands were shaking as I undid the zip of my surgical binder. I expected to see a wounded battlefield. Big, red gashes across my chest; my battle scars. I took the binder off, unwrapped the bandages and opened my eyes in the mirror. It was swollen but it was beautiful. No battlefield. No casualties. Just me and the chest I had always wanted. It was still fresh but I could finally see it. I had waited my whole life for this moment. I couldn’t stop smiling. After my shower the nurse asked if I was okay.

  I was great.

  The road to recovery was faster than I expected. I was up and about almost immediately and I felt good. When I finally saw my scars under the tape that had been holding them together I was shocked as to how thin they were. The surgical binder was the hardest part of it all. It was terribly tight and hurt my back, but after so many years of wearing a binder, I could handle a few more weeks. Wearing a T-shirt for the first time without a binder and still having a flat chest was surreal. I kept waiting for my breasts to return, an unwelcome and obnoxious guest. But they didn’t. My chest just kept healing and becoming more a part of my body. There are still times when I look in the mirror and cannot believe what I’m seeing. There are other times I take it for granted. My nipple sensation never came back, so sometimes it feels like I have an intruder in my body, like this chest is not mine. But whenever I look at it, it feels right. I know I made the right decision.

  I was more comfortable in myself than I had ever been. This gave me new possibilities of exploring my gender, my femininity, my style and also my sexuality. I had spent so long crafting the man I wanted to be that I was finally at a point where I could just discover who I was. My attraction to only women started to change. I met more queer people and began feeling attracted to people of all genders. I experimented with make-up, dresses and different ways of expressing myself. It was nice to feel so
comfortable in my body that I could do these things without feeling it invalidated my gender. People were confused, but for the first time, I wasn’t.

  Nevo with their co-worker, at work as a swimming teacher (2016)

  Chapter 13: The Future is Femme

  The more I thought about my gender and the more I was passing as male, the more I realised I wasn’t a man. There was always a hesitation I felt when saying I was a man, as if I knew it wasn’t the entire truth. I felt I would only be taken seriously if I was transitioning from one to the other. If I had said I wanted certain masculine attributes but still to be the same person, or that I wanted to find medical interventions to ease my dysphoria, no one would have understood.

  As it was, I had to prove my certainty to my family constantly, a certainty I could never truly have had. My family would not have understood any ambiguity. They had brought up valid questions about my gender when I was at the early stages of transition, but those questions needed to come from me, not from people by whom I felt unsupported. I needed them to listen to my feelings, to give me the space to explore my identity more freely. I was finally at a point where I had that space and a comfort both in myself and in how the world was treating me, so I could explore how I actually felt in my gender. I didn’t understand or fit in with men and I felt that being read as a cisgender man erased parts of me. I was constricted by yet another set of rules and expectations associated to gender. I went from the rigid box assigned to women to the one assigned to men, and I couldn’t fit into either.

  I didn’t want to reject my masculinity. It was something I had spent such a long time coming to terms with and embracing. But I didn’t fit in with men. I didn’t get along with them in the way I did with women and even though I was treated better by them, I still didn’t always feel safe. Being read as a man, I was usually read as a straight man, which completely erased my queer identity. When I was read as a gay man, I felt like it didn’t fully encompass the complexity of my history and identity. It was at this time I discovered the term “non-binary”.

  Maybe I was neither male nor female, man or woman. Maybe the idea of gender is socially constructed through institutions and social norms we’ve created. Gender has changed through time, cultures and geographies. Once I recognised this, a liberating thing happened. I started to look at myself as a human being, who is a mix of masculinities and femininities, interests that transcend gendered behaviour, and intricate relationships and emotions that cannot be sorted into simply “male” and “female”. So I came out again, for about the fourth time. This time, not as a lesbian, not a transgender man, or queer. This time I came out as me.

  I asked people to do their best not to gender me, but rather treat me as a human being they know and understand. I began reclaiming the femininity I had repressed for so long. I wanted to meet myself again. I moved from nail polish to glitter, eyeliner, lipsticks, mascara and eventually dresses. It became quite difficult getting dressed every morning. I wasn’t sure if halfway through the day of wearing a dress, I would suddenly feel masculine again and want to take it off. I had to err on the edge of discomfort most of the time.

  I felt anxiety in relation to being read as a cisgender masculine man, which I never expected to feel. But at the same time if I presented too femininely, I ran the risk of feeling the old anxiety I held when I was in my early transition stage. Again I developed some self-hatred and depression. I was upset that I couldn’t simply be happy. I had gone through a lot to get to this point, but I realised much of it revolved around how others would perceive me. While that’s completely valid, it sucks. I wish I could have focused more on how I felt, detached from the perceptions and judgements of others.

  Reclaiming my femininity was a long process. I met with disapproval from wider society and a lack of understanding from my family. They had finally grasped I was a man; they couldn’t begin to process the idea of me existing outside a narrow gender binary. I didn’t want to push them. It had been hard enough to earn the acceptance I had. I didn’t want to lose it. To my family I remained their son, their brother and their “bro”. I have accepted that it is unlikely certain family members will ever refer to me with they/them pronouns. I wanted only to be treated as a human. I didn’t want the associated expectations of being a woman or a man. At Friday night dinners my more distant relatives tried to offer me a kippah, and when I rejected the proposition they got angry with me, so I chose the path of least resistance, which was to be a man. It’s still a big step from what it used to be, but not quite how I feel comfortable. However, I think we all have to make some compromises sometimes for our families, and most people don’t feel entirely comfortable with theirs.

  It was hard for my mum to see me in a dress. She had spent much of my childhood trying to make me into the daughter she wanted and it hurt her that I had rejected it strongly. To see me now, trying to embrace my femininity, was painful for her. I didn’t understand that at the time, and her expectation I would conform to conventional masculinity confused me. I thought we had moved past these rigid gender roles. But I now understand it took her a long time to process who I was as a man. That it would take a lot longer to come to terms with the fact I could be a feminine man, or someone with an even more complicated relationship with gender.

  When I presented as feminine in public, the space around me swelled, as if people were afraid to come too close and catch my trans-ness. I hadn’t been visibly trans in years and it brought back a lot of past distress. People wouldn’t sit next to me on the train. I got yelled at, “Are you a boy or a girl?” as if those were my only options. I was threatened, honked at, catcalled and made to feel as if I didn’t belong. I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. This wasn’t about ideology.

  I still didn’t know how to fit in the world. Some days I felt the only thing that could get me out of the house was wearing a dress and feeling pretty. I’m not sure why, that’s just the way it was. It was constantly scary. I suffered depression and anxiety in my second year of university. I didn’t know what I wanted any more. I knew I loved the results of testosterone, but I wanted to be treated with more complexity than simply as a man. I was more than that.

  I ran out of educational energy. I had received so many questions for so many years and the more I answered them, the less certain I was of the answers. Even when not experiencing explicit transphobia and hatred, the act of living in a society that asserts there is a certain standard to which you must subscribe can be distressing.

  Towards the end of 2013, the year I had come out as trans, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to be involved in a documentary project. I had already done some work with Minus18 and the Safe Schools Coalition and was always excited to get involved in other community-based initiatives. I was interviewed at her house about my process of transition and didn’t think that much about the project. I certainly did not anticipate it would become a national resource in schools to help understand LGBTQIA+ issues and provide information to anyone interested. I also didn’t expect it would be such a point of controversy.

  When the resource came out in 2015, there was a huge backlash. People were angry about the program and claimed that it was indoctrinating children. They argued that kids who were against gay and transgender people no longer had a space to express their feelings at school. There was mass media coverage, protests and counter rallies. The program was pulled from many schools and an investigation commenced to decide whether it adhered to the curriculum and was age appropriate. The report found that it was, but still funding was cut and representatives from Safe Schools were verbally attacked and defamed.

  Here is what I think of the Safe Schools program: Safe Schools saved my life. I’m honestly not sure what my future would have been had my high school not been a part of the Safe Schools Coalition and had a club specifically for queer students. To see it being ripped down publicly and ignorantly was devastating. It was also very personal. There was no recognition in the discourse of how harmful these critiques
would be for young people desperate for the resource. State-sanctioned homophobia would be the terrifying result.

  This was one of the moments where my personal and political selves met at a very tense intersection. It was a scary and triggering time for me. My video was just me, at seventeen, talking about my process and trying to offer some advice that may help gender diverse young people feel more supported. I had to avoid the media for a while and try not to read too much into what was happening. But because I was the subject of one of the lesson plans, all of these attacks felt deeply personal.

  The Australian Christian Lobby wrote targeted articles about me. I felt quite hopeless. I was putting myself out there, exposing myself, coming out to the world, and getting hatred and anger in return. Part of me wanted to hide in a cave for the rest of my life. I spent many months experiencing bad mental health while balancing work, university, Habo volunteering, friendships and as much activism as I could handle. Then when I felt I was getting on top of things again, the articles came out. They specifically quoted me and named me, referred to me as “the transgender” and said I was encouraging “sex change surgeries” for kids without parental consent. I had never done such a thing. I didn’t know what “sex change surgery” even was. There are many different surgeries available to trans people and they often involve a long process to gain access to them. Even though I was old enough to consent to my chest surgery without parental involvement, my parents were a large part of my surgery because I wanted them to be. They had been with me throughout my process. The articles were pure slander. They threw me straight back into a pit of depression and anxiety. I wondered if there would ever be a safe place for people like me.