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National coming out day

  • Posted on October 12, 2013 at 8:36 am

I realised a little too late that October 11 was National Coming Out Day. Not that I would have done anything different. I sort of assume in the main that I am obvious, and have no qualms explaining gender dysphoria to anyone. I feel somewhat immune to the issues by now. I know I am different, and I know that it makes a difference to other people. It is a stumbling block to forming relationships, like a cellar door that remains closed and scary for others. I could say ‘Hey, there’s a light on down there! It’s cosy and furnished, it’s alright!’, but for some a cellar door is preferable.

So the idea of coming out is a tricky one. Partly, coming out makes a difference to you too. It’s the point of no more hiding and being free to express yourself, and that changes you. There’s no going back in other than among a completely new group of people. There are people I never came out to, simply because they never knew me before, and simply accept me as I am. After the first coming out, you begin wondering why you have to keep on doing it. It’s an explanation of course, but why? Coming out is itself an acknowledgement that parts of society don’t want you, or don’t want to really include you.

Coming out is also a big day for each individual friend, colleague, family member. I don’t remember any particular coming out to my daughter, for my wife it was an extended thing over years, accelerating to a point of no return. For others it was more a realisation that things would never be quite the same, but that it was OK. On a number of occasions it was group thing. But for each, my coming out was a decision point for them. How were they going to deal with the new knowledge and awareness? How was living with, loving, or knowing a transsexual woman going to affect their lives, and did they want to have to deal with that wholeheartedly, at arms length, or not at all?

Coming Out is a statement that who you are matters more than being loved or accepted for not being who you are. It is a transaction in which both sides evaluate acceptance of reality and the ability to cope with it.

Isn’t that sad? That as a society we make evaluations on the acceptability of reality? That October 11 2013 has been a day of people rejecting others for being authentic, and a day of realisation that self-authenticity has a price. It has also been a day of great reliefs, where people have found unexpected acceptance and even greater openness in others.

Last night I had a lovely conversation after dance with someone who hasn’t been well. We both live in our dance, we both write poetry, we are both musical. We met, in a way you don’t meet people in other settings. We shared, we hugged and kissed. It’s what people do in these wonderful new spaces I am finding. Did she know about my gender past? I have no idea, because either way it clearly didn’t matter.

Fear

Behind so much of the issues of coming out or being out, is fear. Insecurity. How will gender difference in myself or another affect me? Will it change me, stretch or challenge me? Can I cope if it does? Why? The further I travel the more ridiculous it seems that gender matters that much.

This branch of coming out is not about sexuality, which is another bundle of preconceptions and fears. Sexuality is more simply whether you would ever want to have sex with the other, and 99.9 per cent of the time, that is irrelevant. No, there is something about gender that is not about what you do in private. There is an unspoken fear that you are upsetting some social apple-cart by being different, or that you are deliberately undermining the meaning of life, even! And that does make it difficult to understand how an intimate relationship might be found, developed and survived. Fear hangs on.

I was walking and talking with a friend this week. Had my experience been a Pandora’s box? If so, my fanged creatures were winged and had long departed, leaving some rather good things free to emerge unsuppressed. I suggested we all have Pandora’s boxes of varying sizes, and acknowledged that I had spent the whole of my marriage in fear of being discovered, found out, for I knew not what. It really is lovely knowing that all that fear has completely gone away. Life really does feel very different. Fear and love are strange companions. I lost both; no more fighting between the two.

In a dance workshop this week, we explored breathing. This involved feeling each other’s breath, increasing perception, releasing. It was physical, and I felt accepting hands, another’s awareness of my body, a closeness, that I have not felt for years. It was a very profound thing for me, though not strange in these places, and something I have increasing comfort with. It’s great therapy for fear as well.

I think the antidote to fear, and indeed to coming out, is trust. Not throw-yourself-off-a-cliff-someone-will-catch you kind of trust, but where you know another accepts you for being who you are, not what they would like you to be. There are always some people like that, and whatever their decision on your coming out day or days, you know it matters more to them that you are true to yourself than that you play to their tune.

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Obsession and an open door

  • Posted on October 5, 2013 at 8:37 am

Last night at Five Rhythms dance, my evening drew to a close with having a vision of an open door and a sense of freedom to go through.

The night before I had driven to a dance workshop under an evenly-pink sky painted with a rainbow, and the dance had evoked awareness of our being as trees or plants, desperately clinging to roots held in nourishment, yet wanting to burst free in flower and move around.

A couple of nights earlier I had the most tangible experience of strength and support during a meditation that I have perhaps ever had.

The night before that had been both the anniversary of my leaving the place where I had known love for so long, and the night I was rapped over the knuckles for writing my felt experiences here, of being faced with a requirement of maleness, and how that affected my feelings of self, of being, of respect.

A couple of days ago I also lost my email address (it was dumped by my provider) and with it a lot of old connections. I will try to sort the mess out, but it will also allow me to let go of more past too.

Self?

In the midst of this I was chastened by having threatened a friendship by having been too self-obsessed, and having to return to my house, to where used to be my home, for the last time, say goodbye to my cats I may never see again, collect my last few things and my art from the walls. I have left a legacy of self, in how I created so much in that house, and have withdrawn the last vestiges.

Have I been writing these years out of self-obsession? I guess I’m much closer to that than I have to writing about other people, and whenever a third party has been involved, only very few readers will actually be able to identify them (or themselves). I always try to observe, not criticise. Most of my thousands of readers are in other countries, a few hundred in the UK, and very few local. One, perhaps two, are family. I speak more to people who I shall never meet. And yet I know from my (non-blog) chastening this week, that talking honestly can be painful. Sometimes openness is mis-read or misunderstood, or its intention lost, and talking is best. I heard what my friend was saying, and was deeply hurt that what she said was true: I hadn’t listened enough to her enough to understand her fragility.

We talked at length, the friendship is restored, and I have learned something important, we are stronger. We made the effort to understand.

But here, all I can do is write. It is my experience, my story, and no-one else’s.

Reasons for obsession

I recall reading Helen Boyd’s remark that people with gender dysphoria, when they begin to understand what they have to do, see everything in gender terms. Nothing is more important than gender. It’s an obsession. She’s right. If society allowed us to simply be, without having to be identified, labelled, dressed, as M or F, and even allowed us to move freely about between, then it would be a lot easier and more natural. The terrible truth is that this is nigh impossible. If we do, we are ‘weird’, unnatural, and strange. If we don’t, either we are trapped, or committed not so much to transition as switching, before we are ready.

In one sense, such obsession is unforgiveable and selfish (see also Self, Self(ish), Selfish), but as I have explained at times, when you are drowning, you don’t politely raise a hand and say ‘excuse me …!’. No, you thrash about, make waves, noise and shout, hoping that rescue may come. Sometimes it feels as if though rescue has not come, especially from those you’ve loved and you thought loved you, and that coincidentally your thrashing has been swimming and you find a distant shore.

And that thrashing about, that survival instinct, can make it difficult for others to deal with.

I have loved Neil Diamond’s Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (Be) since I first heard it in the 70s, and I recall:

There
on a distant shore
on the wings of dreams
through an open door
you may find him …
if you may find him.

Being
is a page that aches
for a word which speaks
on a theme that is timeless
and the one god will make for your day.

Singing
is a song in search
of a voice that is silent
and the sun god will make for your way

And we dance
to a whispered voice
overheard by the soul
undertook by the heart
you may know it
if you may know it …

And it reminds me of the explorers that sailed to the edge of the flat earth. And beyond. And returned. My journey has been an obsession too, misunderstood, labelled as brave. And when I have said the earth is round (or that gender and genderedness, even as simply a feminist, is not as taught), I have been thought of as unnecessarily rocking the boat.

Writing here, I know, has helped other people in similar situations. It has been therapy for me, and at times simply the noise of survival. It was better than the suicidal thoughts. It was better than giving in to the waves.

An open door

In losing my home, now my house, I am released one bit more from my past. I closed that door for the last time yesterday.

My last blog on Calling Time is part of that. It was a wide-reaching sense of moving on, and reading it selectively would be unjust. Anything that pushes me back from the open door is not open for discussion any more. I can see that obsession has also held me back; why not just quietly walk through? I feel that now I can.

Accuse me of speaking too openly about the felt experience if you like; all I have done for nearly two years is observe myself and the impact of gender dysphoria on other people, and I think, looking back, that this has been more than a personal therapy. If you have been splashed by my thrashing about, then I apologise. But I have not been waving (Stevie Smith).

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Calling time

  • Posted on September 28, 2013 at 8:38 am

Last blog I wrote that I was not letting my life be put on hold for waiting until ‘completion’. Maybe too many people have said ‘It’s early days’ to me and I’ve believed it. In some ways it must appear like that, because the previous 55 years in comparison seem so long! But it is as true that I have been the same inside all along, and that for me it is no longer early days at all. As I explained at my last consultation at Charing Cross, I genuinely find it hard to recall ‘being male’, because that was only external. I remember being places and doing things, roles and jobs, but only that I was there. As this.

‘Early days’ is for other people, in equally losing their memory of how I used to live. It is not for me, because in many ways I have arrived where I belong. I am calling time on ‘transition’, recognising that I am growing now, not just changing (apparently) from male to female.

This week I went to a sequential dance workshop. Actually an expression workshop. It echoes a conversation I wrote about earlier, of how creative people often have multiple outlets (writing, dancing, painting etc.) that inform and inspire each other. We began after warming up by physically loosening each other up before moving back into dance with a new flow, one partner dancing, the other witnessing, then drawing and describing the fluidity in the dance. Then the dancer went on to write their awareness and feelings. Each pair then exchanged their artistic and written experiences. Finally, each pair recreated dance to the words read out for the whole group. It was all very unfinished and impromptu.

I brought a lot back from it. One was compliments on my reading voice. As you can imagine, this is a stumbling block for me! I listened back to my radio interview a couple of weeks ago, and I was very pleased really with the voice I’ve found. I regret that yesterday calling for an MOT on the phone evoked the usual ‘Yes, sir, let me put you through’, because there are cis women with voices not so different, and they too must get it all the time. But to be complemented for the sound and flow in reading was very gratefully received.

Another was being asked to perform my dancing-to-words first. Have you ever performed impromptu dance for ten minutes, to a kind of poetry and no music, in front of a group? Without seeing anyone else do it first? Scary? Maybe my trans experience has given me a new confidence, or more correctly, release, but I didn’t think twice or hesitate. How I dance, I can see now, is just as other dancers do. It has real rhythm and flow, and yes, it is beautiful, not just inwardly to me.

I went home in a kind of wonder, that I am in this place, not moving into it any more, that it is natural and that I have found people who are simply lovely to be with. I contrasted it with my band tie experience of late. My refusal to be ‘made man’ in order to play music evoked an extraordinary general meeting that I could not attend, though I did offer the feminist aspect of the argument in writing. (I don’t see why I should now have to explain to the whole band that I am trans and that wearing a tie is still psychologically damaging in the circumstances.) Huddles and meetings have afforded me a concession, but I do not want concession, I want simple respect without question. Must one debate whether making a trans woman look like a man might be hurtful, and whether it should be nonetheless insisted upon? One more big concert (sans tie) and I think I shall call time and politely move on.

And this week too, I learned that I should be moving in the next few weeks to my own flat in Hove. Again, I have called time on this rent. I have to be out by the end of next month, so completion on the sale of my house has to happen by then or I shall be homeless, with rather a lot of stuff. It is also a signing off from my family home, even though I did leave it a year go this week. I shall never again be in place where I was once loved, and that is a deep thing still.

Last night I went to Five Rhythms dance a usual. The pace was a little slower than usual, it seems many of us were tired and we moved to half-time rather than double-time. We worked on loosening hips. Yes, that whole part of the evening did evoke memories of sensuality, even of sexuality, and – oh dear &#8211 such deep longing. Since my PSO called time herself on loving me and accepting my loving (I can’t remember how long ago) I have had so little touch and no intimacy. How, I don’t know, but I have called time on waiting ‘to be put right’ before I seek to fulfil this vital part of life (for me).

Somebody, surely, somewhere, would find fulfilment in sharing with me. My heart aches to give and receive love again … It’s time.

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Please press delete

  • Posted on September 23, 2013 at 5:47 pm

I was staring at thousands of emails in my inbox a few nights ago. Virgin Media seems to find it impossible to connect me with myself, or my old broadband account with my new – and will therefore delete my old email address in 30 days. No problem, except my laziness over I.T.-related geek-mails on doing stuff better, and old but interesting subscriptions on environmental issues. Nothing personal at all, just stuff. So why not make sure there’s nothing I really need in there, and delete the lot now? I never send on this email (for obvious reasons) so perhaps I should be thankful. Mind you, I used up most of my month’s phone allocation last month, in phoning Virgin Media about my current email address, which they also could not associate with the fact that they take money out of my bank account for broadband every month!

So, deletion it was. You will be familiar with that moment, when you don’t know for sure if ‘delete’ really means delete? Is this really gone forever, or just in trash/recycling? (And own up, have you never rescued a crumpled up email from the trash bin on your PC?) And bit by bit, all those old and largely forgotten or unwanted emails flew away (you do know that if you hold the Shift key while pressing Delete, there are no second chances?). Job done, and less risk of my emails blowing apart from overcrowding in the folders.

I relived this today. Off I went to Charing Cross (Gender Identity Clinic), in elated expectation that I might get a bit of a schedule for surgery. It’s been four months since I had a full diagnosis sent to my GP. No more questions, I thought. Finally, I have been understood. I’d been given the impression that I was looking at spring 2014 for an end to all this. I was really excited that at last, this would all be over. I was imagining dancing in leggings without the tunic, sitting on the beach in a swimsuit, swimming again, maybe even finding an intimate relationship …

Instead I found myself going over the same ground all over again. I can’t remember how many times to how many people I’ve rehearsed the same things. I even had to sign a form saying I’m white, British, for the umpteenth time. OK, ink is cheap, but my life isn’t. I really couldn’t believe it. No, the clothes were never a fetish; no things I wore from the age of 14 were not sexual. No, I repeat no, I do not doubt this. (You know, some people feel just like you do, and then decide it isn’t for them?) I have not thought for a fragment of one moment that I am perhaps after all, not a woman. Not one fragment of a fragment. You see people every day, you hear their stories, but you will never know what it feels like to know what you are, in this way, to be of a gender at odds with your bits. Have I noticed any body changes after taking hormones for 15 months? For fuck’s sake, these are my boobs!!

Nothing was contributed today, other than to satisfy yet another person that I should be referred for surgey. OK; I think I get it now:

  • You go to your GP.
  • Your GP refers you to local psychiatry (you wait 2 months).
  • Your local psychiatrist recommends your GP refers you to the gender clinic (you wait another 2 months for this letter to travel 3 miles across town).
  • You get the referral date – in all, a wait of 6 to 9 months to see a psychiatrist at the gender clinic.
  • The first psychiatrist agrees you should get a second opinion, so back to the beginning of the same queue … (you wait 7 months for this appointment).
  • You see a second psychiatrist, who confirms a diagnosis as transsexual and recommends your GP prescribes hormones.
  • You stop buying your own hormones …
  • 4 months later you go back to the gender clinic and see another psychiatrist, who agrees with the previous one, who agreed with the one before, who agreed with the one your GP sent you to … who agreed with your own diagnosis of gender dyspohoria.
  • 4 to 6 months later you see the surgical team and once more (with feeling) you go through the options and risks that you’ve already researched in gruesome detail on the Internet and with post-op friends.
  • (At this point I shall get my GRC (gender recognition certificate), followed by a replacement birth certificate.)
  • 6 to 9 months after that, you probably get your operation date.

That’s how it goes in the very best scenario, and, to be fair, mine has been. I didn’t present to my GP until I was 100% sure about myself. I attended the clinic long after self-prescribed hormones. I received my full diagnosis 14 months after transition. I had my final referral out of mental health, into surgical, 18 months after transition. I shall have full legal recognition of my gender, down the very last deletion of my male assignation, six months before surgery. The whole journey to finding out that gender dysphoria was a diagnosis that fitted me, to the end, will be four years.

And you know, in all that time, no-one has asked or offered a blood test? My GP won’t do anything without explicit instruction from the clinic, and no-one has looked at my breasts to see how development is progressing. Gender transition is 95% do-it-yourself. (They don’t hand you the scalpel!)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ungrateful in any way, just very, very frustrated, that after a lifetime’s struggle, at the age of 56, I’m still being asked today:

‘Do you really want to delete?’

‘Are you really sure?’

’If you press delete, you will, in fact, be deleting this file. Are you sure?’

I am holding my Shift key down very firmly and pressing Delete even more insistently.

The only other option is Ctrl+Alt+Del

I think you know what that means.

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Poetic identity

  • Posted on September 21, 2013 at 8:47 am
ANdie Davidson with Dino and Sue Evans

You know how you walk into a party and someone asks you: ‘And what do you do?’ The frequent answers are either your job title in current employment, or perhaps ‘home-maker’ for some mums or wives, but rarely what you feel you really are. Your status in relation to others is what pays you most, not what you find most rewarding. Recently I’ve needed to supply short biographies, and it always stumps me slightly. I mean, how can I encapsulate my life in 70 words or less? Do I start with the job? Do I disclose my trans identity, because…

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