Andie’s Place observations of gender dysphoria and beyond

In the land where all is pink and blue
the purple has no face.
We cry, we dance, we love like you
but cannot find our place.

There are countless stories, wherever the gender variant gather to share, of lost families, lost friends, lost lives. Such is the detritus of being trans*. It isn’t that we do strange things, nor that we love differently, though I do increasingly gain the impression that there are insights on life and love unique to the gender-blessed. We see things in a way others cannot, but that insight sets us apart in a world where we cannot expect to share it. In my last post Miscarriage of justice, I wrote about the inability of any of us to convey any self-knowledge to any other. We can show evidence, we can be persuasive, we can argue, but in the end no-one can know what we know. The truth is: ‘know-man is an island’. Others can be persuaded, the evidence may hold true for another who copies that knowledge for themselves. But is is cloned, not shared. And so we may lose our most loved, our closest, as well as old friends.

Among the stories and tragedies, stands Janus. He’s the Roman god, depicted with two faces, looking forward and back. He is the god of beginnings and transitions. For all trans* people there is this gateway, where Janus stands, between a past and a future, seeing both ways, marking the transition into realisation of ourselves, but as a portent of change that places us apart. We too become ambiguous. Are we two people? Are we two-faced? Are we deceivers (past or present)? Are we a different person, standing on new ground, requiring reassessment for love, for friendship, for acceptability? Or are we still the same person as when remembered in a different gender presentation? Janus is a lonely, if commanding, figure. And like Janus, people look into our faces confused, and back away.

Some trans* people insist that we are not the same, once settled into our gender of comfort. That we have left something (or all) behind. We speak differently to be more appropriate, we walk differently for the same reason, we make adjustments simply to fit in and be comfortable, and make others more comfortable. Are we adopting a different persona? Are we someone else? Are we acting a role? Whatever it is, we are not just differently presented, we are not the same person.

The alternative view is that we are very much the same person. If we (male to female trans*) used to fix cars and write computer code for a living, that’s what we do now. Hormones might reduce muscle mass over time, but we still be the one to pick up six chairs from the stack, not drag two across the floor. I really respect trans* people who are not in denial of their gender history, but are living with it, drawing strength from all that they are, comfortable with who they are. But is is more than that. We are more than our memories, though they are all still there. We are still parents, lovers, partners, we still love, we still get up in the morning with the same aspirations.

I love you because …

But of course you are on the outside, and what you see is what I do, not what I am, and I look different. Very different. But I do not love with my outside, I love with my inside, that same place where my unique truth lies, where you cannot go. That’s where my love has always come from. But this lack of access means that for all of us, perhaps a large proportion of our love is what another reflects back at us. I love you because … you make me feel complete. I love you because … being a man makes me feel more of a woman. I love you because … I can cook and you can fix things. I love you because … when people see or think of us together we are normal. I love you because … you complete my image of what life should look like. I love you because … you play a role that anyone who is just a friend cannot.

I love you because of what you make me.

And if you change, I too am changed. The reflection in the still pool is disturbed, the image gone. But I am still here. And yes, I really was there at every moment of love, at every life event, at every trivial point and in every crisis. We can both recall the same shared memories of times of wealth, of times of real constraint (maybe we were never poor), we can both remember what it was to enjoy bounding health, but to care in hospital or sick at home. I called the ambulance, you booked Pilates, I watched you prepare for and run a marathon, you called the doctor when I screamed in agony in the night. Like you, I knew better and worse. Every shared mountain top, every quiet stream, each moment of birth, each stirring of shared joy, each carefully chosen and share acquisition, each precious gift. Like you I was happy and I was scared, doubting and elated. Each loving touch with the same hand, from the same heart. Am I really so different, now the pool is disturbed, the image gone?

Coming to understand ourselves is something we all do, and for trans* people it is just a bigger-than-average thing to do. We drop a great stone in the pool, the ripples spread and spread, and we are gone from your eyes. The real question is not whether we were there, but why we were loved when we were there, and how we can become so easily un-loved.

We cry, we dance

The other two familiar faces are the theatre masks: one comedy the other tragedy. But Janus is usually depicted impassive. He watches, he doesn’t judge. He isn’t comparing past and present for good and bad, not to separate the two. And yet if there was a trans* Janus, I wonder how he would depict simultaneous grief and joy. Maybe not like the masks, but both, on both faces.

I suspect few trans* people suffer no real losses of family and friends. Struggles of many years when given up bring peace, and often we become gentler, or more assured, more genuine in ourselves; but this was never asked for and the loved image has gone, the attachment lost.

As trans* people, I wonder whether how we love changes. I wonder if we can access a deeper understanding of love – I don’t mean romantic or sexy, I mean getting under the externals, seeing others as they are, welcoming others into more personal spaces? I don’t mean we are superior or better at love, just that we really do lose our sense of gender rigidity, of the link between sex and gender, and the acceptability of either as a precondition of love. Or at least for a time. Some of us move on and merge into a new disambiguated life, invisible and apparently as gender binary as the majority. But if we do access something deeper in love, beyond gender and presentation, it can also be a lonely place, a solitary knowledge told only in pictures and allusions.

In this space of self we cry. Many of us cry in the space of months, more than others do in a lifetime. And it is the grief, not just of a lost relationship, but of entering a place where relationships and love have become very hard to find, because we are different. We are the purples in the land of pink and blue, unrecognisable and reflecting all the wrong things for others. We don’t make the pink feel more pink, nor the blue more blue. And we don’t want purple to be the reason for being wanted either. We have lost our complementarity that makes others feel more like themselves. And so we cry.

In this space of self we dance. Whether we dance with our hands, or dance all around the house, many of us dance more freely than most (at least when no-one is watching), because it comes from inside. We can dance with an inner music, or respond to the call of the music, unchoreographed. Because there is such deep joy in self-realisation, in losing resistance to who we are and can now be, in becoming an undivided person, in finding ourselves feeling utterly normal, very ordinary, instead of torn apart inside and never belonging in our assigned gender. Oh yes; we can dance.

And we love like you too. It’s just that being loved has become so much harder, and those we love may not love us any more.

In the land where all is pink and blue
the purple has no face.
We cry, we dance, we love like you
but cannot find our place.