We taped an episode of the Dr. Keith show last week, and I’ve been sorting out my thoughts since then. I found the experience exhausting. From all reports (Donna, my sister, another friend) we were good. But some days it’s hard to consider the toll that’s paid.
I’m not sure yet what that toll is exactly, but it feels something like a distilled version of all the other work we do for college audiences & at trans conferences except the audience is so different: at one point during the taping I looked at a woman in the audience whose jaw was literally hanging agape.
It doesn’t help that I’ve replayed it all a million times in my head, hoping I said things that make sense. Before that I worried for days beforehand about whether I could really get something across of what this life is like for both the partner and the trans person. It’d be nice to be able to shut off my brain, to stop wondering what the whole show will be like, since we weren’t on alone: we had the company of a trans man & his ex as well as an intersex person.
Overall, I liked Dr. Keith’s take: his general tone was one of “Wow, that’s one hell of a hand you’ve been dealt,” and although the show was a little too anatomically-focused for me, people DO want to know about body mods and I think it was handled about as well as it could have been. It couldn’t have been thorough – transition, transgender, and intersex are a lot to cover in an hour – but it wasn’t sensational.
So I can only wait to see what the rest of you think. It should air before mid-March, and of course I’ll post info about the airdate as soon as I get it.