An Update From Gerbil
Gerbil wrote this beautiful update to share with the readers of FINE about how they’ve found more joy since their interview in the comic.
I love getting to tell people, there was a happy ending.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Hello hello~! This is Gerbil, who at the time of FINE's initial 2012 interviews, was Jonathan, on paper-- proofreader by day, erotica writer by night, and androgynous trans man all year 'round.
I'm blown away by how perfectly Rhea managed to capture Jonathan in every possible way, in the pages of FINE.
Which is bittersweet, because I haven't been Jonathan for several years now.
I'll get back to that, but-- while enjoying this early-2010s time capsule, there was one thing that struck me about my interviews. Why was I so prickly about everything? I didn't remember being that angry of a person, back then.
It wasn't until I read on, seeing Rhea's journey coming home to "they," that I realized.
There was no WORD for me in 2012, yet. And it had been suffocating me.
It seems strange to think of a world where "nonbinary"-- or even "they" as an agreed-upon pronoun-- simply wasn't A Thing. And yet, that's the landscape that Jonathan faced.
He'd been told his whole life, there's Boy or Girl. Pick one.
You don't think you're either one? That's cute.
Hearing the term "nonbinary" in the mid-2010s rocked my tiny world to its core. I can't DESCRIBE what it felt like, to hear there was finally a WORD for me. That the language around me had agreed I was "real." In my thirties.
Much less when I was told, in 2015, that the surgeon who agreed to perform my phalloplasty would also agree to try a then-experimental version of the surgery, with no vaginectomy, as per my wishes. Two previous surgeons had already refused to deal with me, when I'd asked if keeping the factory plumbing was an option. "What would be the point?" I was told.
But I got what I needed, in the end. After years of complications-- which I'm told helped to, pardon the pun, flesh out the surgery's complication rates, based on what they found with me. I can proudly say my dong has been problem-free since 2017.
And as one of the first patients to ever have this particular experience, it's been an honor to know others have followed in my footsteps with this surgery, thanks to the info diary I kept since Day One of the phalloplasty, at chinchillameat.com .
I've given talks and show-and-tells at various trans health conferences since then. Believe me when I say, I can't wait to find out how obsolete my surgery has been getting with each passing year, haha.
But, back to Jonathan. With a phalloplasty under his belt, "nonbinary" in common vocabulary, and "they" as their new pronouns, things were looking up.
And then, in 2018, an article was published that would change Jonathan's life even further.
My former mentor, and one of many sexual abusers from my child/teenhood, was finally publicly #MeToo'ed. I can't currently name him here for legal reasons, besides to say that you've probably seen his TV show.
After that, I couldn't hide from my past anymore. How could I? It was blaring from the news cycle headlines, every day. And in the two years that followed, little by little, I acknowledged the traumas that had shaped me into Jonathan, in ways I had refused to comprehend.
I tried everything I could to get my abuser to see the inside of a courtroom, at last. And I failed.
But I made Art from it. About my past, and being under a #MeToo media spotlight, when I too went public a year later, and how I got through to the other side of... All That.
I have a free downloadable copy of "His Number One Fan," the poetry zine about it all that took me three years to write, available here. [Trigger warnings: childhood sexual abuse, including one warned-for mention of violent CSA; suicide attempt; abortion mention; doxxing mention.]
But, yes. Years after Jonathan realized he'd trained himself to see any display of femininity as making himself a target, and came to accept my young girl self Heidi, and all she had to say to him, Heidi and Jonathan agreed to (for lack of a better term) fuse, and Hyde was born.
Don't worry about getting my name right, by the way. I've always been Gerbil, haha.
As Hyde, I consider myself well and truly blessed. I have the body configuration I needed for my mental well-being; I have my nonbinary identity to keep me grounded; and I have an entire network of friends and loved ones who help keep me safe and sane, and who use my proper pronouns, which exist now.
And so, Gerbil lived happily ever after. Pretty much. :3
-Hyde, AKA Gerbil
