Karen Wilson's book is in easy reach on the coffee table. I turn to the page where we left off last night.
"Becoming".
I received both callings simultaneously: to study for the priesthood, and to change my gender. Not one first, then the other, but both. Simultaneously. I found this as perplexing and troubling, every bit as it was also gratifying and comforting. I didn't know who to turn to. Here we were living in this small town in northern Ontario, my wife and I, raising our three sons. I worked in the bank. She was a house mom., and we were both secretly miserable. We were like two tiny uninhabited islands with a narrow strait of water between them, no bridge, no boat, nothing to connect. We had long accepted bed death and simply no longer desired each other. Perhaps we never did. In small towns and in rural communities people still tend to marry out of a sense of obligation and tradition, not necessarily for love, and if one or both partners is queer, so much the better to have a good cover. We eventually went from separate beds to separate bedrooms. Curiously, I didn't even feel at the time any particular attraction to men. I still don't, and have since come to accept and embrace my asexuality. But as a woman, I don't think I was particularly feminine, and to this day I still prefer to walk around in T shirts and jeans over adorning myself in dresses and high heels. But there was this other anomaly. I couldn't shake the sense that I really did have a uterus, the capacity for becoming pregnant, conceiving and carrying a child and giving birth. As absurd as my male anatomy made the proposal it became for me the very ground of my being, this being a woman, completely and fully. I even felt a strange urge to menstruate, and every month would check my underwear for blood.
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