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Can you imagine a trans partner?

  • Posted on March 1, 2014 at 8:46 am
  • If you’re gender queer and move in circles where others like you find relationships natural, go celebrate!
  • If you’re a bit older, trans* and don’t have others to find intimate relationships with, you go celibate.

I feel a need to discuss why this is, without a long diatribe, and without tying myself in knots (which is easy). Is it simple after all? If you are cis-gay or cis-lesbian (OK, so you just hate labels!, I simply mean not trans*) – then you can seek out places where lesbian and gay people find each other for relationships. But that’s where the T in LGBT parts company. As a result of being trans*, maybe you are lesbian or gay in your found gender. But unlike cis-lesbian and cis-gay people, you don’t need other trans* people to express your sexuality. Trans* is not a sexuality, but rather can give rise to fluidity and change.

And that, as far as I see it, is where the problems start. Not that you aren’t lesbian or gay or bi or even hetero, but that society in general doesn’t actually really believe your gender. Therefore your sexuality, not being based on cis-binary definition, is also in doubt. You may have everything going for you as a genuine, nice, kind, loving person, but What are you, really?

Your decision on what I am really, has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you.

What do I mean by this? If you can accept me as a woman, and only as that, then it is easier to accept that I am hetero, lesbian or bi. Not a bed of roses, maybe, but at least we know where we stand. A lesbian woman will feel safe, as would a hetero man. A hetero woman or a gay man will say no, on the basis that they can’t imagine contravening their sexuality. Or perhaps it is just that attraction could never happen.

If you knew or remember me presenting as a man, it seems we are all at sea. Somewhere in your mind I am not really a woman, though certainly not really a man either, just something indeterminate with infectious potential to make you lose your bearings. That means I cannot be lesbian, I cannot be gay, I cannot be hetero, and therefore you cannot imagine what a relationship might mean. To preserve your doubt about what I am really, I have to be none of the above. It’s almost like Schrödinger’s cat; I am OK so long as you don’t try to really find out! Losing your doubt about my gender can hit your sense of sexual identity hard, if it isn’ what you originally thought. And then you might think of me as the only woman you could physically love, but a friend might as a consequence think you are lesbian, or suddenly not (perhaps even betraying the cause), just because you have gotten close to me and they doubt my gender!

So what do you do with a trans person, who might possibly seem attractive enough to get close to, or intimate with?

First off, you must accept that another’s gender is not your decision, or up to your definition.

Second, you must decide whether your capacity for love of another human being is defined by your idea of what sexuality is.

Third, decide whether a person’s social gender history actually changes you, or whether it only changes your preconceptions.

Fourth, decide whether you know yourself well enough to stand up to what other people think and say.

Only then are you on firm enough ground to entrust yourself and gain a trans partner’s trust, because the voice in you and the voices of others will otherwise go on asking: what are they, really; what are you, really? Most of us never have to be bothered enough to even think of these questions, so being faced with a trans* potential partner is a demand you may prefer to sidestep.

What you think I am affects your definition of yourself.

If you think I make you a lesbian, or gay, and that matters to you, please understand that it is the result of your beliefs about cis-binary sexuality, not because I might harm or damage your reputation or self-esteem. I probably only want to love you …

Summary

It is confusing. What I am getting at is that loving relationships for trans* people are hard to find because people have a fear that some kind of indeterminacy about our gender affects their sense of their own sexuality. It is an extra demand. Only people who can get over that, and find a security about themselves, will realise that loving us is no different from loving anyone they might get to like.

Meantime I feel in utter limbo, because in my generation, finding a new love seems impossible; the doubt: ‘what do I think you really are’ is always present. Just another aspect of what it feels like to be transsexual. I hope it helps.

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Why words let us down and become oppressive

  • Posted on February 9, 2014 at 10:30 am

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Maybe it’s because I have worked writing, editing and proofing technical documents and research reports all my career. What is in our head finds words so that we can share our thoughts. The trouble is, the words are also in our heads, and got there first, and carried meanings that may be precise, but equally may have been misunderstood already when we learned them. Or they may be imprecise words, from a time when understanding in society was not as rich as it is now. There are many reasons why my meaning for a word may not quite be another’s. Then there are specialist meanings: when a word in a legal context, for example, means something more particular than in regular use.

Who owns a word and it’s meaning? I wrote a blog back in July 2012 (Semantic Hegemony, if you know what I mean) that still reads quite well, if you have time. We all think we mean what we say, but often offend when it leads to unintended misunderstanding.

Conversations of this ilk have, this week, included the legal definition of ‘bedroom’ in the context of the ‘bedroom tax’ (for non-UK readers, this relates to housing benefit to cover rent on a property deemed to have surplus space, assessed as the property having a non-essential bedroom). There is no legal definition. In an empty property, the room may be regarded as a bedroom. With a bed in it, it certainly is; but put a dining table in it and it isn’t. However, sleep on your sofa, and your lounge is a bedroom.

The words that tax us most in trans* land are still ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, not least because in a simple, neat world there are only male and female, and each only feels sexually attracted to the opposite. This underlies almost all social and cultural thinking, globally. Anything else is an interesting (or repulsive) deviation. It also underlies the idea that a trans* person changes their sex or gender. We do need to speak of change, because it is an enormous change to present for part of your life one way, and for the rest as something different. But the change is a perceptual one; we do not change sex and we do not change gender. The only problem is a social one, that led us in the first place into having to live a particular way until we were able to assert our authentic selves. That derived from identification-by-genitalia, itself fraught at the fringes.

And all in a way that repeats once more the limitations of language. Our words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are not fit for purpose. By using these words in the ways we think we know what they mean, we cause discrimination. By discrimination, I mean we distinguish one from another, make something different by exception: this is that, and this is other, so that it can be treated differently, less privileged and unequal.

I have been struck this week by minority assertion. The obvious examples have been in Russia, where activists have been arrested and beaten for singing their national anthem under a rainbow flag. There, under recent law, being anything other than heteronormative is lumped together as predatory, along with paedophilia. It is absurd, as well as cruel and barbaric. Activists are people who assert that non-heteronormative, non-binary states of birth are part of the normal and expected diversity of all human life.

I was struck also by a speech by an Irish drag queen (self-defined as a gay male, rather than transsexual) about institutional homophobia. In the link above, do watch and listen, do also watch senator David Norris at the end of the article. The core message is that every time one of us born not fitting the simplistic, religion-enforced, model expressed by the words sex and gender, is set aside in any way, we are being oppressed. Because one person is one colour does not entitle them to diminish someone of another colour. Because one person has four working limbs does not entitle them to diminish another with anything less. Because one person is a man attracted exclusively to women does not entitle him to diminish another who corrected their social situation for anything different. Because one person is a government minister, or priest, or lawyer, or religious leader, does not entitle them to diminish another who has a different take on life.

Inherent sex, sexuality and gender, by any definition, are not the domain of an elite to define a meaning that separates out anyone whose genitals or gender identity don’t fit their personal or cultural view. Anything else is oppressive.

This week also saw a spat on CNN between Piers Morgan and Janet Mock (if you’re unclear about either, get Googling). Both are public figures, one a journalist full of ego and self-justification, the other a very successful advocate for young trans* people who is working against social exclusion, othering and bullying. Why should a young person come to prefer suicide to life in the face of social attitudes perpetuated by ignorance and intolerance? If those doing the bullying had not been brought up with the cultural expectations of sex and gender being so unrepresentative of reality, they would not be bullies. Bigotry is very simple: the need for certainty combined with an inability to learn and understand. Janet Mock knows this place well, and was interviewed about the launch of her book Redefining Realness. What she didn’t know at the time was that the broadcast would be captioned ‘was a boy until age 18’, and that Morgan would treat her throughout as a man-become-woman with complex (implied, deceptive) sexual relationships. The result was acrimony and insults from Morgan on Twitter, and a panel on Morgan’s subsequent show to discuss whether Morgan was a victim of cisphobia.

In all three cases, Sochi, Ireland and CNN, the whole point is that those in a dominant role can sit around and discuss any other group, and make decisions about them, without listening or learning. This is abuse. White people may not sit around deciding the identities of those of any other colour. Roman Catholics may not sit around deciding the fate of abusers or the abused, without listening and learning and acting with justice. Men may not sit around discussing by themselves the rights and equalities of women; this is oppression too. Heteronormative senators or ministers may not sit around deciding the fate and rights of gay or lesbian people and their relationships. Journalists, panelists and experts may not sit around deciding the fate and rights of non-binary conforming or trans* people, without listening and learning that this is not a behaviour.

One other statistic I came across very recently: 61% of transgender people refused medical intervention attempt or commit suicide. That’s higher that the 46% of trans* people in general.

I don’t want to appear ‘one of the oppressed’ because I don’t personally feel that, and this may seem a bit of a rant. Nevertheless, anything that makes me feel that I have to assert the validity of being trans* in society is oppressive. When I came to consider suicide, it was out of the realisation that to be authentic, to be a woman with a trans background, in all likelihood would mean the end of any committed intimate relationship for the rest of my life. My feeling and horror in those dark hours was that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was neither a man nor a woman, and was therefore excluded from the privileges of either. And the reason? ‘Sex’ and ‘gender’ have simple meanings, don’t they? And therefore I am not really what I say. That upsets everyone stuck with hetero and binary. I have become likeable, even lovable, but untouchable.

If I don’t have to tolerate someone for being cis, why do I need tolerance for being trans? If I don’t need to be accepting of someone cis, why do I need acceptance for being trans? Am I waiting for a gift? I do feel accepted, which is a whole lot better than being tolerated, but often it is on the terms of the other. Is this a form of oppression?

I shall leave that with you, without judgement, because we still all need to think about this one a whole lot more.

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Yes, it is a diagnosis

  • Posted on December 24, 2013 at 7:12 pm

‘Diagnosis?’, she queried.

‘You say it like it’s a disorder.’

How do you reply to this? Actually it is a disorder, if the opposite is order. Certainly it is a condition, but we all have conditions. Who defines order, who defines a normal condition and a less usual condition and a rare condition, and in all of this, when is treatment enforced, when is it an option, and what (and who) is treatment for?

I explained that being transsexual is a diagnosis without which you don’t benefit from prescription hormones, let alone elective surgery. It was a very ordinary conversation in a way, and I reassured her that I don’t ever mind talking about the way I was born, if it helps another to understand it as normal, if variant. But I guess that her understanding has been that for me to live ‘as a woman’ is a choice, not that I am a ‘real’ woman.

It comes across in the way people treat you. As we left the party, we women hugged and wished each other a happy Christmas. The men shook hands with each other. Those with a little more wine inside, or who like to feel the ladies like them, hugged the (chosen) women, and shook hands with the men, or slapped a shoulder. One of the latter held a hand out to me … OK. Right. The second hand, I refused, hugged him, and said, ‘No, don’t do that!’ (I mean, one doesn’t flirt with a transsexual woman, does one?) So how does it feel when a transsexual woman flings her arms around you, pecks your cheek and wishes you a happy Christmas? It must be worse than sitting on Santa’s knee.

This week there was a news story of mixed origin but a sufficient reminder that transsexual women not so long ago were admitted to mental health departments and administered electro-convulsive therapy.

This week Uganda enacted draconian laws against homosexuality. An African academic delivered a lecture on homosexuality being part of very old African culture. Somewhere between the two, Judaeo-Christian doctrine and dogma has planted hatred with ideas of what is natural, divinely-ordained and ‘normal’.

This week Alan Turing, convicted of homosexuality and ‘chemically castrated’, and subsequently taking his own life, was ‘pardoned’. What?! He committed a crime, and has been forgiven? Because he (not the many thousand others) was still famous after 60 years?

And in the week since my last blog about ‘parental controls’ to protect children from the evils of the Internet, many voices have been raised, because children questioning or discovering their own gender or sexuality might discover that this is something bad that they should not know about. And if they come close to taking their lives, Samaritans may also have been blocked.

Also this week, I read a blog by someone born intersex. In respect, they used the term ‘hermaphrodite’, and at birth parents and doctors decided to allocate their choice of genitals. A lifetime of surgery later, this person feels abused and mutilated.

This stuff happens. This is humanity.

We do not all develop in utero to a societal dictat, and we are not deformed if we don’t fit it. Some are innately attracted to others with similar genitals. Some have ambiguous genitals, or none, and some have no thought about sexual relations at all. Some like to have sex with people with different genitals. Some have brains of one gender and bodies of another. Some of these desperately want to match them up, whilst others just want to be accepted.

You might expect a degree of anger. In one scenario I am calmly explaining how the centre of self and the brain knows your own gender – whatever that is felt to be – to someone understanding, and in the next I am facing a society that tells me I am inappropriate, disordered, a mistake of birth, not to be found online by children, and in some places a criminal.

People are kind; sometimes they offer help, to talk, or to express my difficulties. It’s lovely; really. But I don’t need help as a ‘problem person’. The only help L and G and B and T and Q and I and whatever people need, is to be allowed to live as ourselves without question, without a second thought, defined only by our own self-awareness, not by false conformity. I mean, who said or defined that human beings are binary heterosexual unless deformed or corrupted in some way? I lay much of this at the door of Western religious monopoly, which tainted philosophy for centuries, and psychology, and even the background to other medicine. And it is this which infects so many countries of the world where non-binary-hetero people are vilified, imprisoned and killed.

So who said that the human race is ‘meant to be’ binary-heterosexual? Have you ever regarded this as a condition you suffer from? Because if you aren’t grandiosely-lettered by LGBTQIA etc., this is your condition. You were born this way. Accept it. Take the label, if you want to label anyone else. And hey, if you could see this clearly, you might not limit yourself to your declared label either.

Christmas brings families together but also divides them. It is a complex time, not least for families where someone non-binary-hetero is excluded, treated differently, rejected, anything but accepted and loved. If yours is a family with someone who does not share your non-binary-hetero condition, and who is not fully included, think about how you feel about them, and above all, why. Maybe your condition is causing you real and unnecessary problems.

‘Yes, it is a diagnosis’, I said, removing my party hat. I didn’t say: ‘It’s just that society decided I needed one and that you didn’t.’

What’s your diagnosis?

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Let’s talk over T (testosterone)

  • Posted on December 21, 2013 at 10:13 am

I don’t know which of us said it first. Three of us were discussing medical issues and lack of clinical care (well, interest, actually). Suddenly we were in complete agreement: blocking testosterone and the male sex drive was a huge relief. A single molecule has such an enormous impact – I’ve seen what it does to a male to female trans person, and envied it’s speed of transformation. But yes, losing that urge, the imperative to respond constantly to it, is heaven-sent.

Time and again over the past few years I’ve spoken with trans people at all stages and every variety. It’s a tough call when you have a contented relationship and good sex: if I lose my drive, will everything else crumble around me? Hell, I need sex, I love it! And what, you’re saying my libido will dive?? And yes, it’s a big thing, among all the other big things.

What is desirable?

I don’t believe that libido is the main factor in relationships and marriages destroyed by transition. Many marriages cope with that. The same applies to impotence; marriages survive. ‘Becoming the same gender as me’ is far bigger, and a partner unable or unwilling to explore the potential in a context of love may include libido in that deal. Which is interesting. Loving marriages survive impotence, lack of libido, disease, injury and surgery affecting genitals. Not always, but love does overcome. Nobody calls you (and you don’t call yourself) gay or lesbian or bisexual for finding new ways to be intimate and mutually satisfying for what has been lost, altered or rearranged. Being trans seems to be quite different.

So we also talked about orgasms. Yes, the female orgasm is different, yes we still achieve it, differently, and we understand it. And we still want it, though nothing like as much. Phew! In some ways I question whether I have lost libido, or just lost drive. Do I want sex? Hell, yes! But not because I am driven, but because I want that kind of loving sharing in my life, that kind of giving, that kind of being wanted.

Is it inappropriate to quote Shakespeare ‘Aye, there’s the rub!’ (appropriately from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’ soliloquy. Interesting, do read it!)?

Blockers and blockers

If this information is useful to you in your trans decision point, well and good. I sometimes meet people reaching the point I did three years ago, uncertain of what transgender and transsexual and gender dysphoria mean, and how prepared they are to discover their own position. These things are seriously important. I discovered the female orgasm long before I lost my sex life, and attracted hugely more attention in online comment than from anything else I wrote later about being trans! But now I have to worry that people who need to read these things will actually never reach my page. The idea of protection through Internet filters may seem good, but it is now blocking access to young people especially, from good information about their sexuality and their gender.

The message appears to be quite plain: learning about sex is bad, finding your gender puts you at risk. Web pages that talk about sex are bad for you and we can’t trust you. Why can’t we trust you? Because all those human beings with testosterone in their blood (like you, mainly) are out to corrupt you. Jane Fae has written about this (link at the bottom to one of her articles, do read it), pointing out that the cultural context of good and bad has also slipped out of our national hands. And this is in a month in which India and Uganda have been added to Russia and Ukraine in the news for savage repression of gay and lesbian people and issues. Precolonial societies had fewer problems with homosexuality and with transsexuality than after our western imports with their male god and male standards, based of course on testosterone, power and guilt.

Pornography

In the middle of this stands pornography. As old as drawing itself, sex is a human activity that has been portrayed as naturally as hunting and building houses. It becomes secretive and dirty when boundaries are stretched, when consent is absent, and when guilt is woven into it. ‘Have sex, but don’t look at anyone else having it’ is a curious construct that is about a lot more than privacy and monogamy. For very many young people, it is the only way to see what another person’s genitals actually look like, how they work and are used. Don’t most of us look at it and use it this way at some point? If we could do that objectively with grown-ups in the absence of embarrassment and guilt, maybe it would not be seen the same way. Can we not accept that male and female responses are a bit different? That it’s OK for you to find a naked male arousing, and for you to find a naked female arousing (whatever you are)?

Underlying much of our guilt and societal dysfunction over sex, pornography, sexuality and gender identity is something that we just don’t seem to want to let go of: testosterone is the power driver of western civilisation. And we allow it to be so. How many women remark that wars would not start if women were in power? That society would be calmer, fairer and kinder? I won’t digress into feminist politics here, but there is real truth in this. Women are subjugated, denied, reduced and treated as second to men, everywhere and every day. Testosterone makes men feel stronger, bigger, more important, driven, and also competitive and yet insular.

That, not the pictures within pornography per se, is the problem. The choice of portrayal, the manner of procurement, the route of delivery, the potential addiction, and the refusal to grasp the issues, are what result in the blocking, that may stop many people reading this page.

Back to blockers

The three of us like the effect of blockers, necessary until surgery relieves us of the underlying cause. No, I am not recommending this for all men, only recognition of this fact in our lives. And here is an interesting illustration, if you would care to compare the top right (progesterone) and bottom left (testosterone) molecules. That little adjustment highlights how close our differences are, and yet what a world of difference they make:

compare hormone molecules

Let’s have the right kind of blockers then, supplied to those who need them, and understand what is being blocked and why. I’m glad you are able to read this. Some people won’t be able to.

 

Jane Fae’s article: Three embarrassing truths about Cameron’s porn filter

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Truth and reconciliation

  • Posted on December 7, 2013 at 10:26 pm

The whole world learned this week of the death of Nelson Mandela. I’ve heard and read a lot of opinion, recollection, reflection and analysis over the last few days, some seeking balance about a man who refused to renounce violence. But no-one can refute or deny that here was a man who changed the world. It wasn’t just his incomparable role in dismantling apartheid, nor his fortitude through 27 years in prison, rather it was his ability to seek reconciliation rather than revenge, and working together rather than division. He became the paradigm for truth and reconciliation, to be used as a model elsewhere and into the future.

Beyond politics, beyond nations, there is a principle in truth and reconciliation that was unique at the time, but which speaks in many situations now.

I tried writing a letter. I rewrote it. I asked myself how much I was writing for myself, and how much for the recipient. My expression of care and concern: was it because I wanted to be heard, or because there was something that did need to be said? Was it my place to speak? Or even be concerned? Was it more my seeking to be understood, or genuinely to help the other, where understanding might be helpful?

It was quite a quandary, and in the end the letter went into the recycling. I wasn’t sure about the motive, and in the end it became a much reflected-upon telephone conversation. It was, I felt, much-needed communication with my almost-ex wife who, I felt, has not really worked much out in a deep way about my transition. I shall never know what it is like to be faced with having an unexpectedly transsexual spouse. She will never know what it’s like to face up to being transsexual. Between us we have very deep questionings about the nature of love and the role of the body in showing and sharing love. Some find it easy, some impossible, some in-between. I guess that’s us.

Truth

I guess we both know the truth as we see it. I feel utterly rejected and betrayed because the worst I did was understand the way I was born and adjust to it. The best I did was to love in the same way as always and hope to continue. But what was forced upon me was the deepest and most honest assessment of my identity, my self, my expression of life itself, and I fell into place, looking and sounding somewhat different from the husband-as-was. I shed fear and self-hatred but gained the agony of losing the love of my life.

She was never rejected, nor her love, but must have felt my rejection of the male role that defined her role, quite keenly. It’s not really for me to say on her behalf. I do know that my female presence felt competitive rather than complementary, and must have challenged her sexuality. But she was not obliged to dig as deep, as I was, into her furthest recesses, and I expect has surfed the loss in order to keep going. Don’t we all do that much of the time? Yes, it’s easy to over-analyse, but it’s also a lot easier to cope with things by skating lightly on thin ice, hoping to get to the other side.

We each have truths to face full-on, if we are to remain balanced people. Mine is to recognise that even the most in-loveness and commitment does not signify unconditinal love. I have to accept that the reality of human love truly can be entirely contingent and dependent on being what’s needed. Yes, I was to a sufficient degree wanted for my body more than my loving, for my means more than my self.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for me to chew on.

Her truth is that if indeed I was born female with male body bits, as per my complete clinical diagnosis, then she was married for over 30 years to a woman. That neither of us knew this possibility is immaterial. The truth is that I have not become a woman, I am just a woman who is finally aligning her way of life and body to what she is.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for her to chew on.

Isn’t truth a difficult thing sometimes? It won’t go away by not thinking about it, or by making excuses for prior beliefs, and the best thing you can do with it is to speak to it, voice it and embrace it. We have to change to fit the truth, because it won’t change to fit us.

So why am I blogging this? Isn’t it just a tad unfair to be the one who always writes, and about pretty personal stuff? These dialogues are very one-sided when I write them out, and maybe I am inventing what my wife is really thinking, presumptuously and unfairly. I don’t know, because she hasn’t expressed these things as I have. All I can do is try my best to imagine what it must be like (see also, from earlier days: Who does she think she is?).

And that worries me on her behalf, and I know that she will be no more alone as a spouse/partner of a transsexual person, than I was as an emerging transsexual person myself. For every one of us who is married, there is a spouse coming to terms. As transsexual people, we get to know each other, go for diagnosis and resolution. They have little or no real support or help, no reason to meet, and have less to invest than we do. They can walk away and rationalise it as they wish. We can’t, and that makes it different.

And yet we reach a truth that makes sense. We are leaving fear, self-hate and denial, and finding self-love and acceptance. They may never do that, and rather find themselves feeling diminished, self-doubting and fearful, or in denial.

That’s why I write – to observe and present these difficulties as issues to properly resolve rather than avoid.

Reconciliation

I have sent over-long texts, emails and letters. I have been overwhelming in my self-explanation and insistence that I, myself, me, am still here. That what is in my head and my heart, my soul – is unchanged. More openly understood and expressed maybe, but not different. Don’t I deserve to be loved for myself?

I try to be honest about my motivations, but yes, I have often written just hoping for a touch of that old love, affection and partnership. Wrong fishing line, wrong hook, wrong bait. Truth must precede reconciliation.

So what is reconciliation? It means no more nor less than bringing together again. I don’t expect anything more than friendship, but it does imply acceptance of truth and being able to step beyond old understandings and beliefs into a shared space.

And divorce? Isn’t that about irreconcilable differences? Or is that also about unwillingness to face truths? Our grounds, for pragmatic reasons of a gender recognition certificate, had to be those awful declarations about my unreasonable behaviour in wearing women’s shoes (among other things) and being seen in public!

No, somewhere beyond all that crap, I hope that there may still be the kind of friendship that only 30 and more years of shared memories and parenting can give. But we shall not get there unless the truths are faced. My plea therefore, is that attention be given to spouses, partners and relations to properly understand that having a transsexual partner does not change you, and that recognition of the underlying nature of another human being does not change their intentions towards you. At present there is absolutely nothing available. If you are diagnosed with a debilitating disease, there is support available for carers. It is respectable to be related to someone who suffers. Not so if that someone is transsexual. It reflects on you, makes you feel you must be something you don’t like or respond to (OMG – don’t even suggest that I may be bisexual, let alone lesbian!!). It is not obviously OK to tell your friends and family that your beloved is trans. (See my early poem: Not like a bone.) But it is almost exclusively the response from friends, that leaving a trans partner is the only reasonable thing to do. How can you explain? No pressure there, then!

For me, reconciliation requires the wholehearted recognition that I have always been a woman, unknowingly having the wrong outward appearance. It is also a wholehearted recognition that human love is not what we idealise, but is (perhaps most commonly) contingent on outward forms and meeting expectations.

The Mandela motif

To the last, Nelson Mandela was kindly, warm, smiling, human, both ordinary and somehow supreme. He achieved world-betterment through both truth and reconciliation.

Dear partners, wives and husbands of transsexual people everywhere: your truths may be unpalatable and force changes in the way you see yourselves and the world, but they are truths. They alone stand between you and reconciliation. You don’t have to want that, of course. But they also stand between you and peace with yourself. Whether you stay in partnership or not, there is no point in not being reconciled with yourself, and no future in not resolving your truths, between you and yourself.

Sometimes the world is just not the way you have been used to seeing it. Sometimes it is not black and white.

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