Last night as I was going through and adding to my “must see” TV list, I spotted “Always Jane” and thought I would give the first episode a glance to see if I wanted to continue watching it, since I’m already well aware of so many of the challenges and issues of the transgender community, being trans myself.

I got hooked.  I watched all four hour-long episodes in a single sitting, up through the final episode where Jane gets bottom surgery to cure her gender dysphoria once and for all.

The show takes the journey with Jane Noury and her family, so it’s quite the tear-jerker in many places. Her entire family supports her completely, but that doesn’t make it easy for them to come to terms with what it means to “get through” all they have to get through, emotionally, medically, and legally, as their daughter becomes fully herself by way of surgery during the COVID pandemic.

(I was with her all the way emotionally, because I was having chest masculinization surgery during the same time period and my surgery was delayed for several months, two different times, due to COVID. Jane got herself sorted in June 2020: I got my chest masculinization in August 2020, after it was delayed for months. Had mine not been delayed twice, we would have had the surgery within a week of each other, hers in NY, mine in Seattle. So when she starts stressing on having her surgery delayed due to COVID, and Trump’s propounded idea not to allow medical centers or insurance companies to cover trans folks’ procedures, I had flashbacks to my own worries about that. I almost hyperventilated again! That bastard’s actions have given me PTSD — Post Trump Stress Disorder! The sight and sound of him make me feel physically ill.)

My Heart Ached for Them All

All my life, I have been an avid reader of trans journeys. Early on, they were all male-to-female journeys (the opposite of mine), but I have a special place in my heart for MtF transgender folks because it’s so much harder in this society to name it and claim it if you were assigned male at birth. In the patriarchal, macho world we live in, proclaiming oneself female is fraught with perils that FtM trans folks don’t have to deal with.

Why?

Because it’s easy for a cisgender patriarchal society to understand why “wanting to be a male” (note the quotation marks here; I’ll explain in a moment) is a desirable outcome: cisgender, heterosexual  white men have it made in today’s world. It has been designed to support them a lot better than it has been designed to any other demographic.

But here’s the thing. Transwomen don’t “want to” be women. Trans women are women. Trans men don’t “want to be men. We are men.  Our brains are wired to be who we are. It’s our bodies that don’t match. And that can cause excruciating dilemmas as trans people approach puberty. Many of them try to commit suicide before they find out there are others like them and that there are ways to “fix” the birth defect that saddled them with the opposite gender’s genitals and  secondary sex characteristics (Adam’s apple and excess hair on males, breasts and wider hips on females).

“Always Jane” is a riveting four hours. I highly recommend it to anyone who is struggling to understand or to support transgender loved ones.  I will also point out that I have written a book about my own journey. It’s called Womb Man: How I Survived Growing Up in a Booby-Trapped World.

And get this: physicians and therapists are using it to help the loved ones of trans people navigate the waters and arrive at support.  For this reason, I consider it the most important of the books I have written to date.  It’s literally saving lives and families. I couldn’t be more proud of that fact…