Review Mode: Naked in All the Wrong Places
If you don't hear someone, you’re allowed to ask them to repeat themself — especially when that someone is the nurse in the examination room telling you how undressed you’re supposed to be.
Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.
Content notice: Non-sexual nudity, body fluids
Look, I’m not the biggest fan of showing people my body even when they want to see it. So, it was kind of a nightmare for me to discover that I was showing the doctor all the parts of my body except the parts the doctor was supposed to look at.
Some context: I’m freezing my eggs. It’s a whole thing.
There are almost certainly more insightful, revelatory stories I can tell about this process than the following one about me getting naked wrong. I mean, the whole thing’s a fraught experience. As a transmasc person. As a single person with no idea what my relationships will look like in the future. As a ground-level comedian in a floundering entertainment industry. As someone living amid the rise of fascism. And so on. But thinking about that stuff makes my head go all noisy, so instead, you’re getting an anecdote about me being bad at undressing.
Last week, I went into the fertility clinic, which I’ll be calling the “We Welcome All Genders as Long as It’s Women Fertility Clinic of New York” (WWAGLIWFCNY).
To kick off the egg freezing process, they ask you to come in on the second day of your period for something called “Monitoring.” I didn’t know what that entailed. I could’ve looked it up, but since this whole process is crazy dysphoric for me, I refuse to engage any further with it than I absolutely have to. No extracurricular research. I’m just gonna do what people tell me to do, when they tell me to do it.
For the director’s cut of this experience (i.e., details that don’t actually serve the narrative but that contribute to the ambiance), follow this footnote.1
A nurse at WWAGLIWFCNY led me into an examination room and said something quickly that I didn’t quite catch. Something about getting undressed before the doctor comes in. She gestured to some kind of covering sitting on the exam chair.
“Thanks,” I said.
Sure, I hadn’t heard her perfectly, but I wanted this interaction to be over.
Because yes, it’s isolating to be a trans person dealing with the dysphoria of fertility treatments all alone. But it’s even more isolating to be a trans person dealing with that dysphoria surrounded by people who have no concept of what that dysphoria might feel like and no incentive to try to understand or comfort me.
When I had tried to seek a little support from people at this clinic in the past, it’d been crazy frustrating and alienating, and honestly, it left me kind of resentful of the whole thing. Like, I know they’re not bad people, but they’re people who’ve shown no interest in making this miserable experience any easier for me. So by this point, I was trying to keep my interactions with the WWAGLIWFCNY staff as minimal as possible.
The thing is, in that exam room, I was pretty sure I already knew what I was supposed to be doing. I’d done this kind of thing before. You go to an exam room, you get naked, you put on a gown, it leaves your butt hanging out. Easy. Classic.
I stripped, but then I decided to leave my underwear on for the time being. Remember, it was the second day of my period. Big day for bleeding. I was rocking pad-no-tampon, and I figured it’s best not to bleed on the clinic’s stuff unless I absolutely have to.
Like, I understood that, since the exam chair had stirrups, they were probably going to need to get into that area, but still. Getting all the way bottom-naked any sooner than strictly necessary just seemed like it would be rude.
So, totally nude except for my socks and underwear, I went to put the gown on only to discover that it wasn’t a gown. It was a paper sheet, roughly the size of a trifold you’d use for your science fair project.
Well, fuck. At this point, I was pretty sure that what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t actually have any better theories, so all I could do was commit. I sat on the chair, held the sheet over as much of me as it’d cover, and waited.
And it was a long wait. I had plenty of time to reconsider the logic of my decisions and make adjustments, but I was locked in.
The doctor came in. A man. This was my third visit to this clinic, and my first time learning that they had any male doctors.
There’s nothing weirder about a male doctor seeing my body than a female doctor — I knew that intellectually, but it was one of those things where my theoretical values and my knee-jerk prejudices weren’t quite in alignment. And if I was going to challenge my biases, I’d’ve rather done it fully clothed.
He-doctor looked at me sitting there on the chair, naked and covered in this baby blanket of a sheet. He was clearly surprised and confused.
I gave him my best Yeah, I don’t wanna be in this situation either, but what’re you gonna do? face. He wasn’t charmed.
After a moment’s pause, he said, “You know, you really only need to be undressed from the waist down.”
“Oh,” I eloquently responded.
“Do you want me to step out so you can adjust?”
I didn’t know if he was saying that for my benefit or his, but the whole thing seemed a little silly. If he was going to explore my uterus, was I really going to draw the line at him seeing my nipples?
“I don’t have boobs or anything,” I said, “so it’s not like there’s much to cover.”
“Suit yourself,” he said.
As he approached the stirrups, I added, “I left my underwear on.”
He stopped. “You did?”
“Well, I didn’t want to free bleed all over the chair.”
“We need to do a transvaginal ultrasound.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay if you bleed — we have an absorbent pad there beneath you.”
This time, he did step out for me to change, which I guess made sense. I didn’t want him seeing me take off my bloody underwear either.
But still, it’s hard for me to find any kind of logic in the rules we have around this stuff. Like, it’s fine if doctors see you undressed but not fine if they see you undress? What, is it suddenly sexual if it’s an act in progress rather than one that’s been completed? Is this a lesson that I should internalize and incorporate into my concepts of eroticism?
Anyway, I took off my underwear very un-erotically, and while I was at it, I put my shirt back on, because it seemed like the respectful thing to do. Then I lay back on the chair, full-on Winnie-the-Pooh-ing it, and waited another way-too-long time before he came back.
“Um,” he said, seeing my nudity v2.0. “You can cover your lower half with that sheet there.”
Fuck, really? He’d given me a second chance, and I still got it wrong? Once is clearly an accident. Twice, and it just seems like I want doctors to have to see more of my body than they want to see.
But also, whose benefit was the sheet for? Was it for my modesty? Cause if he was there to stick a tube up my hole, I feel like that ship had already sailed.
Was it for his comfort? Cause if he was gonna look right into the belly of the beast, it’s hard for me to be sympathetic to him feeling weird about also seeing my mons.
My best bet is that was there to create the illusion of separation. Like, maybe it feels less intimate for him to poke around in there if it’s slightly harder to make eye contact.
Anyway, I put the sheet on, he did his thing, the test results came out fine, and now I’m sticking myself with a bunch of needles every day, as God intended.
I can’t imagine this whole experience — getting totally nude only to have someone to look at my body and be like “wrong, you idiot” — is going to help me be more comfortable in future moments of undress. Like, that’s the reaction I’ve always expected to get every time I get naked.
The Lesson That I Should but Probably Won’t Learn from This: Ask for clarification if you’re confused, even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment. Cause the discomfort could get sooo much worse.
Carson’s Life Updates
I did some standup in Philadelphia, the city where my parents fell in love, but when I was there, I didn’t fall in love with either of my parents.
After its unfortunate last-minute postponement last week, Friendly’s, the show I cohost with Max Higgins, is rescheduled for March 11 with much of the same lineup. Ticket link coming soon.
More Pokemon thoughts: in a dissociative fugue that was a direct result of this whole egg freezing thing, I played through a whole Pokemon Fire Red emulator in two days. My goal was to win with the most girly party possible. It was tough. Outside of Ponyta and the few pink Pokemon, most of ‘em are pretty butch. Like, even the ones that start out all cute evolve to be butch. I mean, what is this?
The Boilerplate
Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. If you don’t already, you can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.
When I got there, WWAGLIWFCNY had me sit around in the waiting room. This is a clinic that prides itself on being gender-inclusive, so instead of the waiting room being pink, it was as feminine as a waiting room could be without being pink. Lots of curvy lines and eucalyptus.
Egg freezing is expensive as fuck, so the clinic was full of dual-income upper-middle-class couples who looked incredible even though it was 7:30 in the morning.
I know that no one ends up at this fertility clinic because family planning is perfect and easy for them, and I know that these treatments are emotionally loaded for everyone. That said, it was hard not to be jealous of these women. Like, I bet when they go to sunrise yoga, and the instructor tells the class, “If this pose is too difficult, you can always rest in child’s pose,” it’s never even targeted at these women.
So finally, after like a half hour of stewing in my dysphoria in the waiting room, a nurse called me. Except she called my old name. I corrected her. Then she did a pretty stabby job of getting my bloodwork and then sent me back to my seat.
It was another 15 minutes before someone shouted, “Carlson!”
Fuck it, close enough.
Lol this is hilariously unfortunate. Reminds me of the time I whipped my boob out at the doctor’s office apparently in a manner that was surprising. I was there for a red spot in the side of my boob—he was going to see it anyway. It’s like the whole tax thing: they know how much you owe but won’t tell you. The providers know, but you have to guess and hope you guess correctly or you get weird looks.
Carson! Thank you for sharing this.