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Charing Cross

  • Posted on December 15, 2012 at 12:08 am

For trans people living in the south (no, I said trans not trains!) the name Charing Cross carries a lot of emotion and feeling. I also remember it from the book 84 Charing Cross Road, but of course the place in question is in Hammersmith. And today, in the rain. A lot. You first learn of it as a place many (and some very well known) people have traipsed their years away to, and found resolution for their gender identity. Then you realise that it is part of West London Mental Health Trust, responding to gender dysphoria (or rather the physiological state of having a brain in one gender and a body in another) as a mental disorder. OK, since DSM V dropped the disorder bit, it isn’t that, but it is still in the mental health diagnostic manual, not in the physiological/hormonal disorders manual.

And so you are placed in the hands of psychiatrists. I saw my second psychiatrist today. When I see my third, for a Charing Cross second opinion, they will finally draw the conclusion that I am of perfectly sound (female) mind – and that the reason I have spent so much money, time and emotion (and pain), come to the edge of suicide (and backed away), lost pretty much all I hold dear, and live alone happier than I could have imagined, supporting myself in a full-time job where I have only ever presented as a woman – is because my body developed with male attributes while my brain didn’t.

Frustrating. People aren’t always as clear as I am, and some transition partially, retreat, reconsider, transition again, have doubts, cling onto things they feel more important, and maybe never decide to physically transition. But they do this after many years, not just after a short while. And so the conversation online today has gone over the value of what is called the ‘real life test’ or more accurately now, ‘real life experience’ (RLE). Basically it means you prove, through witnesses like employment, and people who can vouch for you, that you have lived exclusively in a gender not assigned at your birth, for two whole years.

Unsupported

And it is a dangerous frustration. For a mental health approach, insisting on persisting with the cause of all the distress, indeed placing it all under some unreasonable pressure and risk, hardly seems conducive to good mental health. Why? Because people like me seek out medications before they are available on prescription. Losing hair matters when you are older, and entering puberty matters when you are young. These things are irreversible. Nowadays, young people can have their puberty arrested. But no-one is going to give me anti-androgens while my hair recedes. But also because we have to go many months without seeing anyone at all, during which time we are given the task of unsupported RLE. I was asked today if I would like help with my voice. Of course I bloody would! ‘Sir’ on the phone is immensely hurtful, especially when you have to explain. And yet you can’t even get voice therapy until the third psychiatrist has approved your status as genuinely being the gender you are already living in, for one year.

OK; so you pay for your own laser, electrolysis, prosthetics, wigs, voice therapy, counselling, hormones (this is not a personal endorsement of the practice, just that so many feel compelled to) etc. and do your best, while your world is collapsing around you – and call it real life experience. I suppose if you get through that, you get through anything. But not everyone is as strong or resilient as I am, and I wonder how many ‘fail’, suffer or perhaps die along they way because it becomes too much. I am not alone in finding that I may well be able to obtain my Gender Recognition Certificate and change my birth certificate gender, before I can complete surgery to correct things.

I do understand that for some, being given time and space is important for self-understanding. Let’s not rush anything; maybe you aren’t completely sure, or able to be. But some of us really are. Waiting for treatment is wasted treatment time.

Is this the best way for the health professionals to make sure they aren’t sued for passing anyone for surgery who isn’t prepared to sign an indemnity instead? Yes, I would sign in blood that I would rather die as a woman within a year, than have to live ever again, and for however long, as a healthy man.

Why?

Real Life Experience

Real?

Could it be anything other than Life?

Is life ever either not real or not experienced?

Do we ever experience anything other than real life?

I have been tested. For around 40 years I did not know what was wrong, why I was an outsider among men, why I wanted what I hated myself for. That was real. Very real, and very uncomfortably real. At times it tore me apart inside, it was that real. And it was life, and it was my experience. Ultimately, I failed at ‘living as a man’.

For around 18 months I tried to live a dual gendered life. To hang onto the person I loved most in all the world, to a partnership I valued above anything else, to a shared life that was safe and mutually supportive. I tried. It was life, and it was my experience, and again, ultimately, I failed. That’s two tests, thoroughly lived and experienced that could have destroyed me. What else can I try? Supposing as a woman I fail again. What else could I be, without losing reality, losing life and therefore ending experience?

This is not Real Life Experience for me. This is what happens when all the tests are already done and over. I failed at all the other options, whereas this one has given me a sense of reality, of living, that I never knew I was allowed to experience. I know what I need to complete this picture, and that knowledge gets harder to live with, without resolution, each day. And yet, without any support, I must continue, waiting for appointments for opinions, for treatment, whilst doing my best to convince the world that I am not forever in a transition, but really what I say I am.

There is nothing else. That’s what makes me so … Charing Cross!

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Who does she think she is?

  • Posted on July 29, 2012 at 12:31 pm
An acknowledgement; it may not be accurate, it is just my presumptuous imagination if you like, and told as a story. Yes, it is fiction. A collage of life, out of sequence.

How did she know what flowers I like?

And now she’s sitting there reading New Scientist like my husband used to. I don’t know what the Higgs boson is, but she does, and explained it to me as well as I could understand. The pink lilies are coming out in the fireplace, and she is slightly elegant in a long jade and navy dress, with butterfly ear studs to match the pattern and a lovely matching bracelet that even has jade butterflies in it. She has taste, and says she hardly has to try when it comes to clothes. Her eye shadow is just right for it too. My husband was never really interested in what he wore: greys and blues, without much thought from day to day. And now she compliments me, like he used to. I don’t feel the same about her. Should I try harder with my appearance? Or give up? Or simply not compare? I don’t know where she came from. She sort of turned up in my life and in my home, uninvited, as I saw less and less of my husband.

A bill arrived in the post this morning, addressed to Ms and Mrs. Something is missing. Not right. Part of me. Now she’s telling me how the International Olympic Committee has apparently got it all wrong about gender testing women athletes, and is asking again: ‘What is a woman? What is a man?’ I never had to even think about it. Now she wants me to. Needs me too. And I realise I don’t know either. We talk about all the many variations in gender markers. In the end I know I am a woman. A woman who used to have a man. She says she only knows what she is not.

We have both been to work today. Very different offices, in opposite directions, and we are both tired. She has a new job and welcomes the inclusion and being paid again. I’m lucky enough to have some extra days, so this month feels like it used to when I had a husband who always supported us financially. I think I would prefer it if she wasn’t making this all possible, and that I was the one with financial independence. Then I could say to her: ‘why are you here?’. My husband and I shared everything, always. Now she is sharing my dressing table, crowding me out. It doesn’t make be cross, it just feels too close, taking my space. But I know what I do best, so I head for the kitchen to make dinner and she goes to the computer. I always used to complain to my husband about that, but actually, I don’t want her in my kitchen all the time. Maybe I should jog her about the shed roof that needs re-felting. She promised. Instead I hear her getting the ironing board out. She does get cross about this, saying it doesn’t have to be my job. It’s funny, she does as much vacuuming and ironing as my husband used to. It’s time I set her a shared schedule on the loos and bathrooms, if she wants to live in my house. So long as she doesn’t ask me to mend the shoe cupboard next time. How did she know what to do? Ten minutes and it was back in use, even before it had time to get damaged. I would have asked a man.

We end up eating on our laps in front of the TV, and there’s a trailer for romance programmes for the autumn. People are kissing; soft focus and music to make it all emotionally inviting. It works. She’s looking away, and I know she is crying silently. I miss my husband. He wouldn’t have let me see him crying, even if he had been touched by things like this. He was sometimes, but he always hid it, like getting up to put the plates in the dishwasher. She is grieving something. So am I, but I am somehow angry inside because my husband was taken away and I don’t know where he is, only that he isn’t coming back. That, not the kissing on the TV, hurts. I was Mrs. I was his other half. I was the woman and he loved me like I loved him. I know he didn’t leave me for another woman, or for a man, or because he didn’t love me any more. I know what happened. I guess I understand why. But it isn’t fair, and I wasn’t given a choice. And I don’t have anyone to be angry with.

The evening is very quiet after that, so we get ready for the night, feeding cats, setting the dishwasher, pouring glasses of water, switching everything off and going upstairs. She always seems to know what needs to be done, how it needs to be done to be like it used to. I grab my nightdress and head for the bathroom. I don’t do naked in the bedroom any more. Not when she’s there. That is a right my husband had, but not her. She does naked though. And she reminds me of him still, so I don’t look. And then she comes to bed, wearing the same nightie he used to like to wear, for a while in his last year with me. She feels the same, but I don’t like to touch. She curls up ‘like a tiny beetle’ she says, right on the edge of the bed, facing away. She is frightened of my rejection. She wrote these last verses to a poem:

If it was a wind
with a ticket for a hope
and a promise in its lick
maybe
I would be carried
safely

but this is fear
blowing, just blowing
and I am hanging on
tight
being invisible
to air.

I think she is trying to show she is not taking my husband’s space, even though he isn’t coming back. I don’t want her in that space either. I’m not trying to be unkind. We’re both hurting and I need her to know that. She wants to fill that space. She never will. It would be wrong if she ever did.

I wake up and it is still early. Saturday, so no rush. I can hear slow classical music faintly below me. I know she is dancing, releasing all sorts of strains, in graceful movements reminiscent of the tai chi my husband started doing once. She will make tea, like he used to, and bring it up soon. I should have a shower to replace the long cuddles we used to enjoy on mornings like these. But she will be off out anyway, to play my husband’s old trumpet. She’s just as good. More relaxed maybe.

Breakfast. Saturday Live is on Radio 4 and something comes up that I remember from when I was first married. ‘Do you remember when the kids …?’ I begin. No. That was my husband. He would remember.

‘Yes’, she replies simply. ‘I was there. And you said …’

Who does she think she is?

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It’s time to talk about Dad

  • Posted on June 13, 2012 at 12:13 pm

This post has been a long time in the making. It is the sludge of life, the sediment that sinks and settles and into which feet get stuck. In a rising tide, that isn’t good. Drown, or leave your familiar boots behind. It is a difficult one, it is intensely personal, and not just about me, so I shall try to be sensitive.

Ron the lemurIt is time also because in a few days the UK has Fathers Day. Card shops are full of jokey ineptitudes of dads on golf courses, indulging footie or booze, heads under car bonnets pretending to know what they’re doing – all the fond stereotypes that try to say ‘we love you for all you failings’. I will always be a father to two children; that is my history. But there was never a Fathers Day card that spoke to me. They are all men, and I never was one really, however hard I tried. My DIY was never inept or bodged though, and I still genuinely fix things of all kinds. Last year for Fathers Day I was given the adoption of a Lemur at Aspinall’s Zoo. Ron, in his fluffy black and white glory (I so love lemurs) is sponsored by Andie, one of my early registrations of the real me, and if I can, I would like to go and see him, though of course on my own now.

Although dad still exists as the person forever inside the rather more lovely Andie, Fathers Day this year will be very different. I wrote a poem last year, based on another trans* father’s experience, and might still post it here (it is in the Realisations collection). But it will never be mine.

Role over

Realising a trans* (transgender or transsexual) identity as a family person involves a partner and children in enormous upheaval for all of you. If mum or dad (wife or husband) has been fighting with their identity for most of their lives, and you never knew or understood the essential nature of it until it all came out irresistably, and now they are not, to all intents and purposes, what they were, the rest of the family feels floored. Should they have known? What would have happened if all this has come out earlier? Would I not have married this trans* person at all? Was it all about gender? Would I never have been born? Where is my mum/dad now?

I suppose fundamentally we live on the level of roles. We spread the responsibilities about for a sense of balance and complimentarities: you play this, I’ll play that, you do the other. So long as mum doesn’t try mending the car, dad doesn’t try braiding your hair, and I know who to talk to about boyfriends, and you know who to look to for real strength (and I’m trying not to be sexist here!) we all know our place. Somehow we start as people who find an attraction of personalities, a sexual attraction too. Our babies are born as unknown people waiting to be discovered, and shaped, and worried over. We don’t mind what they are or what they do in the beginning, because they are just being. Gradually over time most of us find we are playing roles far more than simply being ourselves, and often realise this in mid life, as children grow in independence, and we start taking up interests outside the family that reassert our individuality. But we are still identified by our roles: the mum who bakes, the dad who plays music, the daughter who dances, the son who plays loud music. And that’s what we are then expected to do; we are what we do. Just like at parties: ‘What do you do? Oh, I’m a (job/profession/parent-at-home).’

And sometimes, it is enough just to be.

Imagine a scenario. Daughter’s bedroom is impeccable, son is cleaning the kitchen to Mozart, mum is fixing the shed roof and dad is sewing a dress. And everyone is happy because each knows the other has found something that expresses how they feel about themselves. The roles were useful once, but now they are all grown up enough and can be themselves. Mum may understand growing up as a girl, dad may be better informed on electrical wiring, daughter still has social problems to talk about, and son needs a job and how to present at interview. But role expectations are changing. Dependencies are changing.

Do you remember bringing your first baby home? Do you remember feeling so helpless and not really knowing what to do? Do you remember your life changing forever as you took on a parent role? Do you remember the first time the child was playing in someone else’s house and you were not there? And the early days of school, and the first empty house mornings? And rediscovering partnership out of parenthood? We have already undergone radical role changes in our lives, and in many ways.

And I have lost a role. I am not Father. I am not Husband. I am back to being simply me. I have no role any more. Role over.

The father who never left, the husband who never died

The role changed; not me. I was there at every family event, from the first romantic gesture, the friendship become love, the love become marriage. Believe it or not I was there at conception, at births, and through every little event that life brought us. And I disown none of it. So who am I now?

I am the father who never left. The words might be tricky, and seriously, I don’t mind ‘dad’ so long as the male role expectations aren’t hung on it, and I am introduced as: ‘she is my dad’, with honesty. I haven’t gone anywhere, but I do acknowledge the sheer embarrassment I cause. Schools do not teach about trans* issues, they do not appreciate that the world really is not divided into male and female, and so my (grown up) children are very shocked to find that it isn’t so. And their friends. The boyfriend’s family too. O. M. G. How do you become the daughter or son of a trans* parent, when every popular image is of transvestites, bizarre behaviour, fetishistic performance, kinkiness and – goodness, surely, a touch of perversion in there? Weird, or what?

You can only do it by finding out what trans* identity means, looking up gender dysphoria, laying all roles aside and asking:

‘What is it that is so important that a grown man starts living as a woman, and is changing in front of all their family, friends, colleagues and social circle? What drives anyone to do that, even to the extent of losing everything they have and hold most dear?’

Whatever it is, it must be worth finding out, because it is not a game or a lifestyle choice, or a betrayal of any previously held role. Who is this person, beyond the roles, who has the guts to change so radically rather late in life? They are not doing this to you. And sooner or later you may realise that a friend or a colleague or a client has a trans* history too, but you never knew. You never needed to. Meantime, the father who never left has been dropped from the team and the rejection is settling like mud, the feet are getting stuck and the way out is getting lost.

It’s time to talk about Dad.

More than that, it’s time to talk to Dad, and find the person behind the role, who feels no differently about her family than they ever did. Dad isn’t leaving, but you can leave Dad of course, believing she doesn’t love you any more. Well, she does.

And the husband who never died? She was there all along and played a role that she cannot play any more. But that person hasn’t died with the role, and their being there still is an important part of the conversation about Dad. If the role of father has gone, and the (entirely socio-sexual) role of husband has gone, and those roles were all that I was, then by all means talk about Dad without me. But if I am still the person who witnessed your lives in every detail, and held back myself in order to support and protect you for so many years, then let’s talk about Dad together before you leave, not after. You might not like me not playing the role any more, but this is who I am and how I am. I was born this way, and sooner or later, this had to happen, and it does need understanding before conversations become impossible, life becomes too entangled, and so we can all accept the reality, make our choices and move on.

It’s Fathers Day. It’s time to talk about Dad. And when you’re ready, her name is just Andie.

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We cry, we dance

  • Posted on May 28, 2012 at 8:10 am

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.

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A lurking fear … of what?

  • Posted on May 14, 2012 at 9:46 am

Disclaimer. I would like this post to be read as a question mark rather than just a personal statement, and certainly not as a personal challenge to anyone, because it is important to so many people who undergo gender transition as part of a family. It is not a statement of right or wrong, it is an exploration.

So, I come out as transgender.

‘No! For goodness sake, I’m not gay!’

By which I mean, really, please understand that this is about gender, not sexual orientation. It’s about what I am, and it doesn’t change what I do. Am I so assertive only because it confuses things? I like to think so.

‘Well, are you a lesbian then?!’

Er, yes, I think that’s a good description, but I prefer the adjective to the noun.

The funny thing is, gender dysphoria still makes you question your orientation, how it might change, and compare it with people you’ve never really had to identify with before. Suddenly, instead of being a hetero male, I’m in another minority that might not wholeheartedly welcome my membership! I’m OK with that, actually, but it does something to other people. Being associated with me, then, does two things to other people. ‘I have a friend/husband/father/colleague who is a trans lesbian woman!’ Fame – or complication. So what does that make you? I am the daughter/friend/wife/colleague of … Oh dear. You didn’t ask for that, did you? And I am sorry – neither did I.

This thought-piece is not about what has been lost. We all lose something when gender comes into question, because we hung a lot of washing on that line. This is about what is not lost. This is about the person who has the gender dysphoria, who always had it but mostly hidden. And mine isn’t hidden any more.

It’s about that thought: Oh my goodness! What do I make you?

I would like to question whether I make you anything at all, other than someone who understand, loves, cares, empathises, stands by and so on. You are only what you willingly make yourself.

Homophobia

Alex Drummond, in her book Grrl Alex, recounts a conference speaker asking if members of the audience would be happy to read Gay Times openly on the train. We are not homophobic, are we? Not at all. But there is a hiccup in there for many of us. We describe the feeling as ‘being misunderstood’, not as being homophobic, heaven forbid!

So what is the fear? ‘I don’t dislike it, it’s just not me!’

Is that all? I wonder whether there is a fear, and a secondary fear too. Richard Beard in Becoming Drusilla (recommended reading!) records a sensation of ‘transphobia-phobia’, interpreting his discomfort of being with Dru (in her transitioning phase) in the presence of people who might be less than friendly. Yes, we are afraid of having to show we are unafraid to people who are afraid. People who are afraid, I suggest, that happy LGBT people undermine not just social order, but personal security in being ‘normal’.

‘What if I get too happy being with gay/lesbian/trans people and I feel too comfortable? Does that mean … that I might not be straight??! What will people think of me? What will I think of myself?’

Personally, I think it is vitally important that we come to understand exactly why we have any discomforts. Is it that we feel ‘unselfed’ by misidentification as something other people don’t always like? Or that we become a proxy target? Perhaps those discomforts are nothing more than our insecurities.

What I make you

I hope this isn’t an unfair thought experiment, but try it anyway, and don’t blame me if you don’t altogether like it. It’s about understanding, not about making decisions.

Disclaimer. Again, this is meant for people in relationships everywhere, struggling with this experience. Swap the genders round – it’s the same story.

You are lying in the dark with your lover. Their hand is gentle, and you trust it. The hand treats you with respect and with tenderness. It explores, it reassures, it loves. It feels safe. It feels good. Very good. And it is just as it has happened a thousand, ten thousand, times, catching you in all moods, interpreting you.

You are lying in the dark with your lover … you drift off to sleep, you awake. Their hand is … there, at rest. The sun has risen; you turn. And you see in your lover that something has changed.

Not their love, not their intent or respect. Not their eyes and the look in them when they meet yours. Not their hand. Not their tender kiss; not their tongue. These are all the same.

Your lover, you know (you may not see), has changed their gender.

This, you realise, is the hand of a woman. These are the eyes of a woman, the kiss and tongue of a woman. And their hand is … there. As it has thousands of times before. Respecting, loving, even worshiping … you.

What does this make you? Why does it give such discomfort? What is the fear? Do you feel drawn into a strange world from which you’ve always felt safe? And from all those ‘other people like this’ that you are being made to feel one of? Are you just afraid of being misidentified? When you lay there in the dark, before the sun rose, what was in your mind, or either of your hearts? Why was it so important, in this situation, your lover’s gender?

Here we are not looking at the procreative possibilities, they may be long past. No, we are talking about the expression of love. If the touch is not different, nor the intent, the love – what is the fear? What causes the tinge of distaste, and the – well – inappropriateness? What was it you liked, there in the dark? What is it really that you don’t like, in the risen sun?

(I like to end as I began:)

‘No! For goodness sake, I’m not a lesbian!’

By which you mean, really – what?

That accepting what is offered changes your sexual orientation? That it changes what you can and cannot do as an expression of human love? That it changes what you are?

And what is it, that you think changes you? The hand? Or you?

 

I only mean to encourage a deeper probing of why we are so unsettled by gender, and why, I suspect, homophobia (even heterophobia) and transphobia can lurk in every one of us. None of us changes anyone else without them being changed by their own fears and insecurities, not ours. Given how we have all been educated in the meaning of gender, it is quite understandable. And it is strong; strong enough to block the love intended or given in intimate spaces, often over many years. But that does not make it the only possible response, when we allow ourselves to reinterpret gender for a better fit. For all of us, it’s not about trying harder, it’s about letting go.

Continue reading A lurking fear … of what? »

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