Nuisance

Yesterday, I had another laser session on my legs and arms. The technician seemed harmless enough and I thought there might be something in my file indicating my T status, but apparently not…or at least, perhaps she didn’t read it.

So, I have my shirt off, a small sports bra on, and I start explaining to her where the hair is located on my arms. Somehow, in the course of our conversation about my hair, I mention to her that that’s what happens when you’re on testosterone for most of your life. At that point she looks puzzled.

“Why did you take testosterone?” she asks. “Were you a body builder, cuz they take testosterone?”

“Uhhh…no, I’m transgender. I was born a guy,” I respond with.

If you have never seen a deer caught in the headlights, this was probably as close as you could come. It took her a few seconds to process what I was saying, but she seemed OK with all of it.

Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this was due to my disclosure or not, but she launches into at least an hour and a half of religious stuff. I find out she is a born-again Christian, used to smoke and drink all of the time, found God, blah blah blah. She said she’d had a lot of people treat her bad in her life and that they were going to get what they had coming to them, because God worked that way. She said her Dad had cancer and that he wasn’t with God like she was, and this was a way that God worked.

Oh man! I would never wish that on anyone. Why would anyone think, if there was a God, that God would strike others down just because someone did something bad. Whoa. Talk about needing a wake up call.

OK, I think I have mentioned my stance on religion before, but here’s a refresher. I think religion is good for a lot of people. It gives them hope and morality in this sick world we live in. However, I don’t think it should be crammed down people’s throats. In this country, we have freedom of religion, or in my case, freedom from religion. I choose not to practice anything. It just doesn’t benefit me. Plus, as I told my tech, too many people within all of the religions and churches hate me. That’s another bad thing, is that all of these religions/churches say one thing about loving all, but then they find a way to hand out a lot of hate, especially against anyone different…such as gay, lesbian, transgender, etc. They also seem to wage a lot of wars…even now, many countries are plagued by internal religious conflicts. Now, not all churches are bad, but the ones that basically brainwash you into their ideals…well, let’s just say that they aren’t all that good.

As we were finishing up yesterday, and she continued to pester me with the God stuff, I almost thought about freaking her out by talking in the male voice. I could have said stuff like, “I’m the Devil” or “I’m Jesus and I’ve come back to tell you that you’re all going to Hell,” but I figured that might seriously freak her out.

So, I was back at the laser place again today to finish up a little that they weren’t able to get yesterday. This time, I had a different tech, and since we were going to be hitting the upper thigh, I thought it was better to disclose to her before we got too far into things. I, again, said I was transgender only to get more of the deer in the headlights look again. So, I blatantly stated, “I used to be a guy.”

Her reaction time was much better, as was her response. She complimented that she never would have guessed and that I looked pretty decent. She was also more open-minded than yesterday’s tech, even asking me how the previous tech responded. The one today said that she ran into a lot of persecution when she was a child, with her non-Catholic family growing up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood.

Anyway, enough about religion. Let’s all just get along, OK?