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Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors
Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors
Summary: A text-and-image rough transcription of a live talk I gave about my hysterectomy 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon.
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Originally performed live 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon. It was a fundraiser for abortion funds! In that spirit, if this essay transcript moves you, please consider donating to the Lilith Fund, which helps pregnant Texans.
Hello, and welcome to Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors! Before we get started, some quick content warnings: there will be one gory photo, which I will warn for and make so you have to click to see it, and I will also be discussing in passing incest, violence, teen pregnancy, and miscarriage. Medical procedures regarding sterilization will also be discussed in detail, accompanied with line drawings. Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get started!
Hi! We’re LB Lee. We’re multi (AKA “multiple personalities”) and we’ve been making comics and zines about it since 2007. We’re a mixed-gender group of contrarian bums, and we run our communal life on group consensus. Getting all dozen or so of us to agree on major life choices can sometimes take some time, which usually isn’t too big a problem, but lately our period had gotten unmanageable.
We weren’t in physical pain really, but our flow had grown increasingly heavy. At the worst times, we were having to get up every two hours at night, until finally we completely rearranged our menstrual life just so we could go outside without having an accident (because, this being during COVID, all the public restrooms were shut down). We felt bloated and gross all the time, and we were doing all sorts of weird diet things to try and hang on to our iron levels. I ate a lot of chicken hearts and spinach, got hooked on pumpkin seeds, and took to boiling an iron ingot in my drinking water while my roommates looked on with poorly disguised revulsion. But worst of all was the intense emotional instability—which the horror of COVID helped conceal for a while. After all, we were in a global pandemic; everyone felt terrible, right?
Then Roe v. Wade got overturned. Now my heavy bleeding wasn’t just a horrid inconvenience, but a constant reminder of my own fertility, a constant reminder of how vulnerable I was, a constant reminder of something horrible that had happened to me as a child.
For context, I grew up in Texas, where minors couldn’t get birth control or an abortion without parental permission (or a court order, but I had no way to know that back then). I also grew up in a violent incestuous family. You see the problem. Teen pregnancy ran in my family for a reason, and I didn’t dodge the curse.
When I was sixteen, I was impregnated. I was beaten. I miscarried. And I was lucky: I was spared bearing, raising a child in that hellish environment.
Now every period took me back to that horrible time in my life, where I had also bled heavily. We tried multiple different kinds of hormonal birth control, and they all made us even crazier. What’s more, we could swear that the symptoms became even worse when we went off!
Clearly something bigger had to be done. We got together as a group and everyone agreed: none of us wanted to physically bear a child. It was time to become sterile. But how?
There were so many options. Tubal ligation? Which kind? An oophorectomy would cause instant menopause, but would that make the instability even worse? What about a hysterectomy? (God, there were at least four different kinds!) What about complications: ectopic pregnancy, ovarian shard pain, or incontinence? We had to crunch the cost-benefit analysis for every option and get our whole raggedy battalion to agree on one. Unanimous consensus, remember?
This isn’t just a matter of noble ideals. Any one of us, if we truly don’t like a decision the others make, can sabotage the whole thing, and we know it, so we have to get all of us on board for a decision of this level of importance. Any one of us can filibuster us into total paralysis, just like in the US Senate, only unlike the Senate, all of us are on this sinking ship together and have a vested interest in making sure the thing stays afloat.
Just to make the whole thing an even bigger pain, the three of us who most badly wanted to be sterilized were also the three with the biggest hang-ups around doctors, surgery, and pelvic exams. We were really having trouble. But fortunately…
We had Miranda, the headmate hero we don’t deserve! She herself was pretty neutral about the whole thing—our fertility didn’t upset her—but for our sake, she helped Mori make the appointments, and then on her own took not just the pelvic exam but the ultrasound (the experience of which she compared to getting basted like a turkey). Admittedly, we were going through the motions. We figured our issues were all psychological. But it turns out…
Surprise! We had us a tumorous babymaker!
Most people call them uterine fibroids, but I’m going to call them “my tumors” because it’s equally true and more accurately describes my feelings about them. Made of muscle and connective tissue, fibroids are super-common tumors, though the statistics are vague—I’ve seen anywhere from 20-80% of women getting them, which is such a wide margin of error as to be meaningless. Black folks apparently get them more. They are overwhelmingly non-cancerous, but that doesn’t make them any less inconvenient. And we had three of the suckers, each the size of a golf ball, so really, it’s no wonder we felt bloated and gross all the time. Also, some uterine fibroids might eat estrogen like dollar doughnut day, so taking hormonal birth control very well may have made things worse!
You’ve never seen anyone so happy to be full of tumors. Suddenly, all those complicated choices dwindled down to basically one. We’d tried hormonal birth control and it hadn’t helped. A copper IUD might, if the tumors hadn’t distorted our uterine shape too much, but it had the possible side effect of making us bleed even more, which we didn’t need. There were three surgical options:
Bye, monster truck uterus! You tried your best! Time to send you to your Viking funeral!
Also, heads up, this is where the gory photo is. Don’t click the link it if you don’t want to see a photo of what a tumorous uterus looks like outside the body.
https://www.reddit.com/r/surgery/comments/jzv7th/got_my_uterus_removed_oct_29_2020_had_one_uterine/
This, by the way, is not our uterus. We forgot to ask for photos, and besides, ours came out in tiny pieces so wasn’t very photogenic. No, this photo comes from someone on Reddit who conveniently had a similar condition to us—though our tumors were all the size of that big one there in the middle, and she was in way more pain. Like us, she had both her uterus and her Fallopian tubes removed (we did it to reduce our cancer risk), but unlike us, she also had her cervix taken out. We did not, since we had no need to (and also because we've heard it helps bladder function).
We underwent surgery on January 18, 2023. (Miranda, our headmate hero, went under the knife for us.) The average uterus (if such a thing exists) is apparently roughly 6 ounces, the weight of a hockey puck. Ours was 16 ounces. That is two and a half times the amount of regulation uterus! That is too much uterus! We literally gave our pound of flesh for this! Plus we turned out to have a cyst on one of our Fallopian tubes—only a centimeter big, but still, not sorry to have that out of the way too.
The first week of recovery was rough. Laparoscopic surgery requires a lot of gas be pumped into the abdominal cavity, which put pressure on my phrenic nerve and caused agonizing pain in my ribs—a 9 of 10. I ended up in the ER for a day, but thankfully, nothing was wrong with my body otherwise. It just hurt a lot. But after that first week or two, I boinged up like a beach ball held underwater, and now I’m basically fine. I won’t be wrestling bears any time soon, but I feel great!
More than great: I feel free. I didn’t realize what a Freudian sword of Damocles my fertility was, how much of my energy it consumed, because I’d been compensating for it since I was eleven. My body felt like such a liability, all the time, and now, for the first time, I’m not afraid. Even if someone miraculously succeeds in impregnating me ectopically, neither me nor the baby will survive the birth. I will never be forced to bear a child the way I could've as a minor. I will never be forced to bring a new life into a violent, terrifying environment. Nobody can ever hold that as a threat over my head ever again, and nobody can coerce me into unspeakable degradation to avoid that eventuality.
I see people up north here sometimes getting complacent about their reproductive rights. “That’ll never happen here,” they say. But it can. If we’re not vigilant, it will. Children are among the most vulnerable, because they cannot vote. They get no say in who represents them, they have very few ways to influence politicians once they're in office, and adults have near-total power over them. It is up to us to protect their rights to bodily autonomy, to managing their own fertility, despite being at the mercy of adults who may not have their best interests at heart. We need to recognize that laws that require parental consent for children's access to birth control or abortion can put those very children in lethal danger.
According to a study by Maeve Wallace et al for Obstetrics and Gynecology, "Homicide During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period in the United States, 2018-2019," "Homicide is a leading cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period in the United States. [...] Pregnancy was associated with a significantly elevated homicide risk in the Black population and among girls and younger women (age 10-24 years) across racial and ethnic subgroups."
I became fertile when I was eleven years old, and I never got to forget it. I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and no child should ever have to make the choices I had to make, not just for my own safety, but for the safety of the hypothetical future baby that I never wanted to have in the first place. Let's work to prevent that!
Thank you for coming out today! If you enjoyed this lecture, feel free to check me out online at healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain or consider donating to the Lilith Fund, which is devoted to pregnant people in Texas, where I grew up! Have a great night!
Summary: A text-and-image rough transcription of a live talk I gave about my hysterectomy 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon.
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Originally performed live 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon. It was a fundraiser for abortion funds! In that spirit, if this essay transcript moves you, please consider donating to the Lilith Fund, which helps pregnant Texans.
Hello, and welcome to Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors! Before we get started, some quick content warnings: there will be one gory photo, which I will warn for and make so you have to click to see it, and I will also be discussing in passing incest, violence, teen pregnancy, and miscarriage. Medical procedures regarding sterilization will also be discussed in detail, accompanied with line drawings. Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get started!
Hi! We’re LB Lee. We’re multi (AKA “multiple personalities”) and we’ve been making comics and zines about it since 2007. We’re a mixed-gender group of contrarian bums, and we run our communal life on group consensus. Getting all dozen or so of us to agree on major life choices can sometimes take some time, which usually isn’t too big a problem, but lately our period had gotten unmanageable.
We weren’t in physical pain really, but our flow had grown increasingly heavy. At the worst times, we were having to get up every two hours at night, until finally we completely rearranged our menstrual life just so we could go outside without having an accident (because, this being during COVID, all the public restrooms were shut down). We felt bloated and gross all the time, and we were doing all sorts of weird diet things to try and hang on to our iron levels. I ate a lot of chicken hearts and spinach, got hooked on pumpkin seeds, and took to boiling an iron ingot in my drinking water while my roommates looked on with poorly disguised revulsion. But worst of all was the intense emotional instability—which the horror of COVID helped conceal for a while. After all, we were in a global pandemic; everyone felt terrible, right?
Then Roe v. Wade got overturned. Now my heavy bleeding wasn’t just a horrid inconvenience, but a constant reminder of my own fertility, a constant reminder of how vulnerable I was, a constant reminder of something horrible that had happened to me as a child.
For context, I grew up in Texas, where minors couldn’t get birth control or an abortion without parental permission (or a court order, but I had no way to know that back then). I also grew up in a violent incestuous family. You see the problem. Teen pregnancy ran in my family for a reason, and I didn’t dodge the curse.
When I was sixteen, I was impregnated. I was beaten. I miscarried. And I was lucky: I was spared bearing, raising a child in that hellish environment.
Now every period took me back to that horrible time in my life, where I had also bled heavily. We tried multiple different kinds of hormonal birth control, and they all made us even crazier. What’s more, we could swear that the symptoms became even worse when we went off!
Clearly something bigger had to be done. We got together as a group and everyone agreed: none of us wanted to physically bear a child. It was time to become sterile. But how?
There were so many options. Tubal ligation? Which kind? An oophorectomy would cause instant menopause, but would that make the instability even worse? What about a hysterectomy? (God, there were at least four different kinds!) What about complications: ectopic pregnancy, ovarian shard pain, or incontinence? We had to crunch the cost-benefit analysis for every option and get our whole raggedy battalion to agree on one. Unanimous consensus, remember?
This isn’t just a matter of noble ideals. Any one of us, if we truly don’t like a decision the others make, can sabotage the whole thing, and we know it, so we have to get all of us on board for a decision of this level of importance. Any one of us can filibuster us into total paralysis, just like in the US Senate, only unlike the Senate, all of us are on this sinking ship together and have a vested interest in making sure the thing stays afloat.
Just to make the whole thing an even bigger pain, the three of us who most badly wanted to be sterilized were also the three with the biggest hang-ups around doctors, surgery, and pelvic exams. We were really having trouble. But fortunately…
We had Miranda, the headmate hero we don’t deserve! She herself was pretty neutral about the whole thing—our fertility didn’t upset her—but for our sake, she helped Mori make the appointments, and then on her own took not just the pelvic exam but the ultrasound (the experience of which she compared to getting basted like a turkey). Admittedly, we were going through the motions. We figured our issues were all psychological. But it turns out…
Surprise! We had us a tumorous babymaker!
Most people call them uterine fibroids, but I’m going to call them “my tumors” because it’s equally true and more accurately describes my feelings about them. Made of muscle and connective tissue, fibroids are super-common tumors, though the statistics are vague—I’ve seen anywhere from 20-80% of women getting them, which is such a wide margin of error as to be meaningless. Black folks apparently get them more. They are overwhelmingly non-cancerous, but that doesn’t make them any less inconvenient. And we had three of the suckers, each the size of a golf ball, so really, it’s no wonder we felt bloated and gross all the time. Also, some uterine fibroids might eat estrogen like dollar doughnut day, so taking hormonal birth control very well may have made things worse!
You’ve never seen anyone so happy to be full of tumors. Suddenly, all those complicated choices dwindled down to basically one. We’d tried hormonal birth control and it hadn’t helped. A copper IUD might, if the tumors hadn’t distorted our uterine shape too much, but it had the possible side effect of making us bleed even more, which we didn’t need. There were three surgical options:
- Myomectomy: removing the tumors and nothing else. Conserved fertility, and tumors had a bad habit of growing back. Nope.
- Uterine fibroid embolization: blocking the arteries that fed the tumor, causing them to starve to death. Somewhat conserved fertility, though less so than myomectomy, but less helpful for people with a big uterus and too much tumor mass. No.
- Hysterectomy: the only one with a guaranteed no recurrence and removed our fertility.
Bye, monster truck uterus! You tried your best! Time to send you to your Viking funeral!
Also, heads up, this is where the gory photo is. Don’t click the link it if you don’t want to see a photo of what a tumorous uterus looks like outside the body.
https://www.reddit.com/r/surgery/comments/jzv7th/got_my_uterus_removed_oct_29_2020_had_one_uterine/
This, by the way, is not our uterus. We forgot to ask for photos, and besides, ours came out in tiny pieces so wasn’t very photogenic. No, this photo comes from someone on Reddit who conveniently had a similar condition to us—though our tumors were all the size of that big one there in the middle, and she was in way more pain. Like us, she had both her uterus and her Fallopian tubes removed (we did it to reduce our cancer risk), but unlike us, she also had her cervix taken out. We did not, since we had no need to (and also because we've heard it helps bladder function).
We underwent surgery on January 18, 2023. (Miranda, our headmate hero, went under the knife for us.) The average uterus (if such a thing exists) is apparently roughly 6 ounces, the weight of a hockey puck. Ours was 16 ounces. That is two and a half times the amount of regulation uterus! That is too much uterus! We literally gave our pound of flesh for this! Plus we turned out to have a cyst on one of our Fallopian tubes—only a centimeter big, but still, not sorry to have that out of the way too.
The first week of recovery was rough. Laparoscopic surgery requires a lot of gas be pumped into the abdominal cavity, which put pressure on my phrenic nerve and caused agonizing pain in my ribs—a 9 of 10. I ended up in the ER for a day, but thankfully, nothing was wrong with my body otherwise. It just hurt a lot. But after that first week or two, I boinged up like a beach ball held underwater, and now I’m basically fine. I won’t be wrestling bears any time soon, but I feel great!
More than great: I feel free. I didn’t realize what a Freudian sword of Damocles my fertility was, how much of my energy it consumed, because I’d been compensating for it since I was eleven. My body felt like such a liability, all the time, and now, for the first time, I’m not afraid. Even if someone miraculously succeeds in impregnating me ectopically, neither me nor the baby will survive the birth. I will never be forced to bear a child the way I could've as a minor. I will never be forced to bring a new life into a violent, terrifying environment. Nobody can ever hold that as a threat over my head ever again, and nobody can coerce me into unspeakable degradation to avoid that eventuality.
I see people up north here sometimes getting complacent about their reproductive rights. “That’ll never happen here,” they say. But it can. If we’re not vigilant, it will. Children are among the most vulnerable, because they cannot vote. They get no say in who represents them, they have very few ways to influence politicians once they're in office, and adults have near-total power over them. It is up to us to protect their rights to bodily autonomy, to managing their own fertility, despite being at the mercy of adults who may not have their best interests at heart. We need to recognize that laws that require parental consent for children's access to birth control or abortion can put those very children in lethal danger.
According to a study by Maeve Wallace et al for Obstetrics and Gynecology, "Homicide During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period in the United States, 2018-2019," "Homicide is a leading cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period in the United States. [...] Pregnancy was associated with a significantly elevated homicide risk in the Black population and among girls and younger women (age 10-24 years) across racial and ethnic subgroups."
I became fertile when I was eleven years old, and I never got to forget it. I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and no child should ever have to make the choices I had to make, not just for my own safety, but for the safety of the hypothetical future baby that I never wanted to have in the first place. Let's work to prevent that!
Thank you for coming out today! If you enjoyed this lecture, feel free to check me out online at healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain or consider donating to the Lilith Fund, which is devoted to pregnant people in Texas, where I grew up! Have a great night!
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Those suckers can get HUGE. Thank god ours got caught earlier, and we had the health insurance and doctorly approval to get it done sooner.
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Hat tip to your doctors, here's to many more like them!
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It was not bowel contents. It was tumors. Trust me, I've spent time squishing my guts after the surgery, the mass is gone!
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*hugs you gently*
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now that our neck issues have let up we’re suddenly in good enough health for ‘elective’ surgery, which means finally potentially getting the hysterectomy we’ve wanted for at least 7 years (quite possibly longer, our memory doesnt go back that far though) but we were kind of agonizing over the exams involved and reading this was super helpful—honestly had not occurred to me that we could just have a better equipped headmate take on that part rather than having me (our usual dr appt tank, but with a horrible phobia of this stuff) sit through a pelvic exam.
so as usual thanks for the writing :) -crow&
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