A little under four days ago, a surgeon took out great chunks of my reproductive system.

This was by design, and extremely careful design at that. We left one ovary, in case I ever have to come off T, so I’ll still produce my own endogenous hormones. We left my cervix, because my body freaked out at dissolvable sutures last time I had them placed, and we didn’t want to risk wound separation directly inside the gooch. (That’s the medical term.) The fallopian tubes are both gone (more like faNOPEian tubes!!). The tiny laparoscopic incisions on my belly are, in all but one instance, literally glued shut. The remaining instance? Stapled. I am a craft project. I asked my surgeon how the staples come out, she said “so I have this staple remover,” and let me tell you, that does not rank highly among things you want to hear re: your own imminent fleshly prospects.

I was trepidatious about this surgery, for the obvious reason that my previous surgery prompted a months-long nightmare of concatenating wound separations. My reasons for going ahead were twofold. The first, largest reason: I didn’t know how long I could wait before the possibility of getting it done was removed from me. We’ve been watching this latest round of appropriations bills with bated breath and a very normal amount of dread, waiting to see if the Democrats would pass any anti-trans riders in the interest of funding the government. Back-door bans on gender-affirming care – for anyone, at any age – were a serious possibility. We’re lucky that, as of right now, there are none.

The second reason is that I trusted my surgeon. When I was first put in touch with her, we spent a solid thirty minutes on a video call, and I outlined everything that went wrong last time. Incredibly – it still feels incredible to me, every time this happens – she listened. She got in touch with my top surgeon, with an allergist, with her colleagues in obstetric surgery. She didn’t make me any promises she couldn’t keep. She worked with me on a plan that we both felt comfortable with: minimal sutures, extensive post-op monitoring, contingency plans in case things got weird. When I went into the OR on Friday, she held my hand as they put me under anaesthesia.

She cared, as small and simple as that sounds, and put that care into practice at every step. It made the whole terrifying thing feel possible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about care, while I have little enough else to do. I am recovering under genuinely dire circumstances. Multiple people are dead in Minneapolis, shot in the street by what amounts to an occupying force. There’s a five-year-old boy in prison in Texas, separated from his parents and desperately far from home. I don’t believe for a minute he’s the only one. I am scared to speak on any of it, because I’m not a citizen. I am calling my representatives daily nonetheless. I heard my voice crack on the phone to Padilla this morning. I hope he hears it. I hope he feels it. It is the least, the very least of what I feel.

Care, though. Where there is terror and cruelty and violence there is care, in far greater measure than terror could hope to meet. I’ve been haunted by the story of Chad Knutson, from this article:

One of those latecomers was a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker named Chad Knutson. On the morning after [Renée] Good was killed, he was at home with his two hound dogs, watching a live feed from the Whipple Building, where ICE is based, a five-minute drive from his house. A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.

Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.

“I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”

[…]

Knutson now goes to the Whipple Building almost daily, bringing thermoses of hot coffee for the people who hold up signs and bellow at the ICE agents and convoys as they drive in and out. He has been tear-gassed so many times, he said, his voice has gone hoarse.

There are more Chad Knutsons than there are Jonathan Rosses. I am not a natural optimist. Still, I believe in the human capacity for courage and solidarity. That we are failed so often by the systems that govern us doesn’t ultimately blunt that crucial edge – not when it really comes down to a fight.

Alex Pretti, shot dead while defending a woman he didn’t know, was a nurse. I thought about him when I went in for my first post-operative check-in yesterday – about him, and about Tanya, the nurse who spoon-fed me jelly when I could barely stay awake after surgery. I kept drifting off; my body kept forgetting to breathe. She kept waking me up, endlessly patient, feeding me carton after carton of apple juice until I could hold a complete sentence in my mouth again. Most people would do this, if they knew how. If they didn’t know how, then I believe they would do what they could. Pretti did what he could. I can’t equate one thing to another. I can’t elide the monstrosity of his death that way. But I see him in everyone who has cared for me this week, and I see the way his loss has animated a city and a country in rage and grief, and I believe in the power of care more strongly than I ever have before.

It’s early days yet, still well in advance of the point at which my healing went sideways last time. I don’t know if things are going to get weird again. But in this quiet, interstitial space between open wound and fresh scar, I am being looked after as well as I could wish. Please look after each other. I am increasingly sure that it’s the best chance we have.