You are currently browsing the Helpful pages category

Black dogs, feeling suicidal, and reasons to be strong

  • Posted on April 19, 2013 at 10:53 pm

OK, so this is going to be the most sensitive and difficult blog thus far. I feel I do want to cover it, because I’m trying to observe my whole experience, and by doing so hope to help others either on a similar journey, or with a loved one, find their way through with least damage and most hope. I haven’t been able to address it until now, but I feel safe.

First of all, I am not writing in a qualified or advisory capacity, and if you recognise you need help, don’t delay. Talk to a trusted friend. Samaritans will never feel you are wasting their time, even if you are only a bit scared. Do it; get help.

We are probably all aware now of the appalling statistics that trans* people as a group suffer way and above a higher suicide rate than any other minority. Approaching half have at least attempted suicide, and maybe three-quarters covers those who have thought about it. The actual stats don’t matter, the proportions speak well enough.

First up, let me position myself here. No-one wants ‘suicidal’ on their medical record if they can help it. No-one wants to admit being there if they can avoid it. There is even some kind of stigma in this, and with gender dysphoria already viewed and diagnosed under the heading of mental disorders (and it assuredly is not such), there is psychological pressure to be less than open. It took me a while to even talk about it outside therapy. But it is important, because I was there, and there were reasons.

After transition

It was three months after transition that my worst moment came, and thankfully I was already going to regular therapy, still hoping to rescue a marriage, and was helped just when I needed it. For a brief period I stepped closer and closer to the brink. I knew exactly what I would do; how, and why just didn’t matter. There was nothing else meaningful or better, to be honest, and the whole thing felt incredibly easy to do. Maybe if I had actually prepared for the moment I would have come to my senses, or chickened out. But at that point, there was no other meaningful future and nothing better. No; I did not think of the effect on anyone else. This was a place without answers because it was a place without questions. It offered an emptiness. There was no ‘next’. It was a placeless place, utterly devoid of anything. And therefore an obvious option for escape.

There is no need to elaborate my plans, the important thing now is that I didn’t do anything. I did work it through, I did bear the unbearable, and I even promised my therapist to keep myself safe. The way I put it is that I stood on the edge, but the wind blew just hard enough in my face to overcome the vertigo. I am thankful, and I feel confident now that I shall not easily find myself there again.

Reasons

OK, so what happens to trans* people that we can find ourselves in such profound despair?

Many things, and for you it will be different from me, but let’s see if we can talk about some and pull them back into the light to see them properly.

1. Being trans is being different, really different

Once you know you are trans*, wherever on the spectrum, it isn’t at all like having to come out as L, G, or B. This isn’t just your sexuality, which isn’t overt for everyone to know, and about which you can choose to be discreet. You have to face seeing if you are right and comfortable with your newly-realised (perhaps uncertain) identity in a very obvious way. You cannot start living in a new gender role without presenting differently and trying, with no experience, to be unnoticeable. You know you will be obvious, be an object of opinion, and have to deal with a lot of explanation, gossip, back-chat, even real opposition and cruelty, or public – even physical – abuse.

Pressure: Coming out trans* is like being one of the audience, picked out, hauled up and thrust onto the stage in the middle of a play without a script or costume. Can you face it? What will the audience do? Are you strong enough?

2. Your family will not understand and will reject you

The seat of all your security, all your assured love, often resides with at least a few direct family members. Your children? Your spouse? Your parents and siblings? How can you explain to them in a way that you know they will all come with you, embrace you and offer help and support? The sad fact, and we all know this (which is why there is such fear), is that families do not understand. Some do, but many don’t. However close your family feels, however devoted, it is as unpredictable as a lottery.

Pressure: Who are you prepared to lose, what are the consequences, including your financial future, where you will live, what will you do? Is this a lottery you are ready to play?

3. People will not understand, life at work will be hell

When a work colleague turns up in a gender presentation you haven’t seen them in before, with a different name, and frankly getting a lot of it wrong, people are going to talk. They will have prejudices and opinions, many may be directly rude and unco-operative, others will simply be confused and uncomprehending. Even those who ‘accept’ your ‘decision’, you know will do so quite superficially.

Pressure: This is your livelihood, your status and social role. What if you feel forced from work, or can’t cope mentally and get pushed out? How can equality and diversity law really protect you except in a theoretical way? For all the stories of people who transition successfully at work, this is another straw on the camel’s back. Can you really go through with this?

4. If wrong-gender living has at times been hell, how do you know that this is going to be better?

Most of us at some time express the conviction that transition in the end was neither a decision nor a choice, but was thrust on us by the way we are and there being no other resolution in order to find peace within ourselves. But what if we get it wrong and want to go back? What if there is some other underlying reason for the way we feel? What if getting clinical attention is difficult? What if you have a blocking GP? And you hear of the inordinate wait that others experience getting seen. Can you face everything at once: being so different, thought of as bizarre, rejected by some of your family, probably your spouse, being constantly misunderstood and disbelieved, and all the while struggling to learn basic gender behaviours you should have learned long ago in growing up?

Pressure: Just because you are trans* does not make you strong, or even determined. It can leave you feeling quite helpless, undefended and exposed.

5. Will anyone ever love me again?

This is my personal black dog. It is the most difficult bit of this blog entry, so I must be careful.

Are you consigned to being neither one thing nor another, never again to be desirable or wanted, to be anybody’s friend but nobody’s lover? You know you may be a wonderful and loving person, you know what you can give, but if even the one who has loved you so much, and you love, rejects you, then who could ever want you ever again? Doesn’t everyone else just want someone normal?

Pressure: Stepping out of the circle of love, affection and intimacy is like walking into Siberia in a t-shirt in winter. Can anyone really, seriously consign themselves to that personal isolation? Will you only ever be wanted by seekers of the exotic, the curious and intrusive? What kind of cis-person can you possibly find? Mix that with a newly-ambiguous sexuality, and you can feel very lost and isolated indeed.

Honest answers

These points skim the surface, because they describe the main elements of the average situation. They are the plausible realities that for too many are very true, but go nowhere near the raw and pressing emotion and real psychological pressure. You can’t come out one day and take a holiday the next. Suddenly it is the deep end, not of a swimming pool, but the sea, rough and surrounded by rocks. It is too easy to be overwhelmed. But you don’t have to be. Let’s take it all to pieces and see what you can do.

A. Being different

Being ‘different’ is unavoidable, but there are many resources online to help you, lots on YouTube and dedicated serious trans* websites. You can find moral support with many unseen friends around the world even through Facebook. I would advise against anything more ‘personal’ though until you are really firmly on your new feet.

In many places there will be an accessible support group. They aren’t all good, and if you are trans* rather than a cross-dresser, make sure you don’t just get the group that meets ‘for fun and relaxation’. Do your best, because you will improve, and you may well be very surprised by the help you get buying cosmetics or even clothes. Bear with the awkward bits, like finding prosthetics, or wigs if you need to. You may feel you have to go to what you have regarded previously as less savoury places.

Avoid places where you feel exposed and uncomfortable until you feel better prepared and settled. If you know late clubs on a Saturday night are risky, don’t go. Maybe you do love clubbing, and maybe you see no reason why you shouldn’t. Just be fair on yourself, especially while you feel new and vulnerable. Ease your pressure. Above all, get used to being ordinary in your gender, and don’t overdo dress, makeup, mannerisms etc.

Learn to accept that ‘normal’ is a very arbitrary and narrow definition, and that you are part of the variability, not some freak. You are not alone. Go and find the stats about sex and gender, and be surprised. You aren’t so different after all, you’re just a late learner. Be kind on yourself. You should start to feel very ordinary after a few months’ commitment to living as you feel is right.

It’s OK to be acceptably different. Really.

B. Family

Every member of your family is an individual, with their own social conditioning, life stories, opinions and philosophies. They are not all your family because they love you. Children are children and parents are parents, and so on. Only a spouse can be presumed to have any discretionary love, and that love may not be placed where you thought it was. You have to let people be people, even if they are your family. Believe me when I say you will find truer friends than you have known as you become established, with or without your family.

But all too often there is loss. And you can do nothing about it. So you are trans*? Your partner is cis-hetero? It may be the worst choice of anyone’s life, between authenticity of self and love from the other, but with which will you die happier? I know the answer to that; you must just believe it could be true, until you do. Being true to yourself above everything else reveals a lot more about your prior assumptions than you can imagine. How you see your need for status, recognition, or for possessions and friends may well radically change. So long as you can find a way forward to being secure enough, so long as you can actually survive, you will be surprised how being comfortable with your gender outweighs everything else and keeps you going.

Yes. You can lose your entire family, and survive. You matter, and anything that is contingent on you living a life that is untrue to yourself, whoever it is for, is not worth it; however enjoyable, comforting and secure it used to feel. You will grieve massively, but you can also learn to let go of it and move on. Really.

Believe in your own inner strength. After all, you have a deeper and wider view of life than cis people do.

C. Working life

If you are employed, you are protected in your employment from harassment, discrimination and prejudice. There is a lot of employment law and good practice on your side. Accept, therefore, that you are perfectly entitled to live and work as you wish to, in terms of identity. No-one has the right to expect you to do anything else, and they are not bigger or more important than you. Someone in a senior role has no more right than an ignorant sexist young person in the workshop, and if they bother you, you are in the right and action should be taken. Know and feel that you are protected, and believe in yourself.

Things do go wrong at work, but many people transition perfectly successfully in their jobs and are surprised by the level of respect they get. You will probably have to live with pronoun mistakes, jokes, overhearing others talk about you, and having to remind or correct people. Just do it all with dignity and integrity, and if you can, good humour. Other people need understanding too, and they haven’t done this before either.

Do not for one moment think that your gender status makes you inferior in any way. Rather, come to understand that this is a gift and a privilege, to experience life so broadly and openly, and be able to show that to others.

D. Frying pans and fire

Your progress and confidence will be hugely helped by knowing that the anxieties, fear, self-hate, simply not belonging, are over. Never deny how you have lived so far, because it will always be your history. Make peace with it. Life will change, as will some of the people you know and associate with. Embrace the new and don’t hang onto any old patterns that don’t help you settle. You will be aware of your lack of training in presentation in a different gender, but remember that confidence is nine-tenths of making everyone else secure with you. So assume your right to be yourself, and your right to be as present as everyone else, and claim your space in the world. Just because ‘you are still you’, doesn’t mean people won’t treat and see you differently; there will be swings and roundabouts, so go with the flow rather than arguing and fighting. You can do without it at this time.

A new life is quite possible. It might not be easy, but it is there. If you got this far, you are a self-aware survivor; believe it. So enjoy all the fun and good bits as much as you can and never, ever, feel guilty about it.

E. New love

Here I pat my own black dog on the head, and treat her as a patient, faithful friend. All I can say right now is that even if I never find an intimate friend again, I am still far happier as I am. But practically speaking, give this one time. You don’t always work out your own sexuality clearly or quickly when you move into a different hormonal regime: be prepared for surprises. So unless you want to invite hurts, don’t head straight for dating sites. You could be lucky of course, but it’s up to you. I found that I re-evaluated a lot of my previous thoughts about loving and being loved. I lost a love that I’d invested everything in, only to find it was contingent on being a man, being a husband; not being an individual, a partner, friend, companion and lover.

So find your true values, explore then and confirm them. Then live by them.

Above all, learn to trust that life is about belonging, being part of a much bigger world, seen and unseen, and that your survival is not just about your own capabilities. Much will be unexpected, so learn to live with gratitude for everything that makes you feel either where you want to be in yourself, or one step further towards it.

Dealing with despair

I started with the darker thoughts as a congregation that can bring you to despair. If they don’t or didn’t, that is good, but for too many it can get too much to bear, or seem too impossible a journey to see through. It can take you by surprise, as it did me. No-one understands suicidal thoughts. They are intense and private. But don’t let them grab hold, because there really are other ways of seeing things, and other escapes from your thoughts. You know when you are being pulled down; find something you can always hang onto when you need it.

I can show you that by breaking it down, each difficult part can on its own be seen to be survivable, and you can believe me or not, because all I have is my own experience. I can urge you to find someone to share your fears with, whom you can trust and who will listen. But really I just want to say don’t be overwhelmed. Your identity is your right, not the gift and permission of others, and there are very many of us the same. Yes we are different, but it can also in the end be experienced as a privilege. No-one can tell you who or what you are, that you are more or less worthy, so believe in yourself. You are a survivor, a thriver, but if you need help, please go and get it.

As a postscript I want to add some invaluable advice my friend Sam was given by a psychotherapist: when you feel like you should be dead, it’s because something in you needs to die, not the whole of you ̵ just a part of you. Sit with the feelings and work out what it is. Then let go of it and wait for the resurrection of new life within.

Continue reading Black dogs, feeling suicidal, and reasons to be strong »

1 comment »

Cause, fault, blame, responsibility: an uncomfortable family

  • Posted on April 12, 2013 at 1:32 pm

Some long while ago I wrote on this blog in response to the accusation many people born trans face: that they are being selfish. (Self, Self(ish), Selfish)

What do people see? They see a person whom they thought quite stable and happy, suddenly doing something quite bizarre. And that apparent behaviour intrudes on their lives, disrupts and challenges it, whilst insisting on acceptance. That is not always forthcoming; families are destroyed by lack of understanding and unreadiness to change. Is this still the same person? Even a clinical diagnosis is met with scepticism. This, surely is a derangement, a lifestyle choice. With all our shared social conditioning, this is weird.

Blame

A man does not become a woman in our world. They become some pretence, some male-looking actor mistakenly persuaded that their role belongs in real life. Somewhere between this perception and the reality, so often, destructive and divisive forces are at work. I haven’t even been able to have the conversation with my grown-up daughter, to find out why we cannot even have dialogue about her impressions, feelings and perceptions. But surely there must be a mixture of confusion, embarrassment, anger and blame.

As I work out what possible grounds for divorce are honest and truthful, I compare this birth condition with others. A congenital muscle disorder that might leave me in a wheelchair? How disruptive is that, how life-changing, how relationship-changing? And yes, it can lead to marital breakdown, as can mastectomy or impotence. But blame? ‘I married a fit, strong man, not this!’ Is this completely different from gender? Is the love of the other really so different in each case?

Cause

My wife and I do not use the word ‘blame’. I consistently use the word ‘cause’, because I fully accept that the way I was born, being hidden so long, has resulted in loss of my family, marriage and home. I could no longer be ‘her man’. The operative element that has to be examined is choice. Why could I not have continued as I was? Well, all my life there was a part of me that I hated. I feared it; it was morally wrong to me, a perversion even. Largely unexpressed, but incapable of eradication. And therefore not something I could ever disclose. My wife said to me this week: ‘No-one should hate themselves.’ What kind of choice is this: between hating yourself – and being authentic but unloved and unwanted?

This is the result, and gender dysphoria is the cause. There is no blame. Why? Because my wife reacted and responded as the overwhelming majority of wives would. It’s very ordinary and simple really. As in my last blog, marriage is a self-serving contract; it is not really about the other at all. A wife has a husband for a reason, and if that husband is no longer going to play that male role, it’s over. Tough. I’ll let you be different if you’ll let me be normal, but don’t expect me to live with you, let alone want you like that. So there is a cause in the other too: conditioned normality within strict boundaries.

Fault

So much for cause but no blame. What about fault? Fault has several meanings. It can mean defective. This is my fault because there is something defective about me. It can mean a fault line. Two masses (or people) rubbing up alongside each other in contrary directions causing division and friction. It can mean the result of a careless or deliberate act that causes damage. Well, I still maintain that when a person experiences gender dysphoria, their transition into gender congruence is not a deliberate chosen act, but rather inevitable and perfectly fair and reasonable. There is no fault in being authentic: we are not nasty or even unloving people. Nor is it defect: only variance. 1 in 1,000 of us are to some degree intersex, 1 in 4,500 (birth identified) men and 1 in 8,000 women experience gender dysphoria. This is no defect deserving of rejection or blame. This is not fault.

The fault-line analogy is better. Both sides are working in opposite directions. So if fault has any meaning it belongs equally with the socially-conditioned partner for whom what the previously-loved partner is, matters vastly more than who they are. So love dies, because that is what it was founded on. This was our fault-line.

And so the cause, the blame, and the fault, when a family or a relationship fails under gender conflict, are equal. Neither side should bear more than the other. In a few cases, love is of a different kind. Perhaps sexuality is more fluid, or love more unconditional, or compassion profoundly greater. But losing everything is almost normal for the transitioning person, however lovely, loving, kind, talented, generous and committed they are. Person-hood does not play a part. I am fortunate compared with friends facing vindictiveness in partners. And in those cases, I do tend to feel that there is blame, simply because such attitudes are unjustified, deliberate and sustained.

Responsibility

And so finally, to ‘responsibility’. This is the missing word so often. It means whether you are the rejecting one or the rejected, you accept responsibility for the outcomes. Each must recognise the cause of their response, whether becoming authentic, or choosing to keep their norms unchallenged. And as above, this should be equal. As in my last blog, my marriage failed because of both of us. My dysphoria was the cause of my necessary change, but my wife’s conditioned normality was the cause of her rejection: our degrees of choice were perhaps not dissimilar. I shall not argue whether either of us could have resisted each of those pressures.

I took my responsibility by dissolving the emotional torture through leaving. I bore that burden first not just because I was no longer wanted, but because I felt I could and should. I had a life to develop and clear aims in achieving peace with myself after forty years. No-one was going to help me with that and I no longer hoped or expected it. But now we come to part two.

Part two is dispersal of our shared house and assets, and that means a secure family home that still exists, with cats and a productive garden, energy efficiency, and all we worked for together over 30 years. So it’s where the real hit is for my wife (son and cats), my daughter having just moved out to start on her own. It’s the end of everything, and it will hurt. Not me, so much, because I went through all that six months ago. I have nothing left other than the financial asset to help me find a more permanent and sustainable home. But I know it will raise in the others the same old feelings of cause, blame, fault – and responsibility. That too is equal. But I know that a new reality is sinking in for those who used to be my family; it’s time for them to realise their responsibility, not least in failing to gather around me when I needed it, and in the rejection that has now lost them their home too. They don’t even talk together about what has happened.

And that, however it is said, is not me blaming them. There are causes on both sides, there is responsibility too. And that needs to be fully recognised. ‘I take full responsibility for rejecting you and ending my love for you.’ How does that sound? I think it is fair, and perhaps worth voicing.

Continue reading Cause, fault, blame, responsibility: an uncomfortable family »

Care to leave a comment? »

Risk of shock: emotional charge

  • Posted on April 1, 2013 at 7:25 pm

This one is bit more of a thought-piece, so settle down and think with me. It isn’t about gender at all really, it isn’t especially about me or anyone in particular, but I hope one or two readers will find it useful to reflect on. The thought just came out of struggling to describe what I and others around me have been experiencing, and seemed to fill a space that made sense. I hope it doesn’t come across as didactic: I don’t intend more than to provoke thought.

Have you ever emerged from or been pushed out of a relationship, and felt locked out of a place where you left part of yourself or your life in trust, unable to regain access for retrieval? (See I counted on you.) Or maybe gone back and been hurt all over again? Time and again we do it, putting ourselves through it all over. What if you are seen as the one to withdraw, and the other really isn’t letting go …? Will you miss that vital chance to put things right and be glorious again?

When I was in my teens I was very keen on electronics. In those days it included valves, waxy capacitors, big resistors that could get hot so you could smell the dust toasting. So we aren’t talking about 12 V power supplies or less, we are talking ‘high tension’, including 90 V batteries (yes, really). No microcircuits then, and in audio systems, a quality without hiss or noise you didn’t get until digital came along. It was simpler to understand too, but I guess a tad more dangerous to mess about with. I did get electric shocks, sometimes from big smoothing capacitors quite some time after switching off the mains power. Curiosity, incaution, call it what you will, it was a hazard that I wasn’t always careful enough about. I learned about electricity and its effects on the human body and came to understand how to work with it without getting hurt. About switching on, respecting, switching off, using insulation, and assuming nothing about connections.

Nowadays most appliances are double-insulated and not even earthed, with ‘no user serviceable parts’, and screws you don’t always find screwdrivers for in B&Q. But we are familiar with a tangled drawer full of chargers and the need to plug in the phone, laptop, toothbrush, camera, epilator or whatever, in order to keep life going.

And so the analogy: we keep our lives going emotionally by investing energy in safe places where we can get that energy back. We charge up our friendships, our working positions and colleagues, our managers and superiors, our families, and our partners and lovers. Then, when we need that extra in return to keep us going when we feel in deficit, we can draw on it, in terms of goodwill, support, kindness, opportunities, favours, love, excitement or stimulation – or security.

Think about where you charge up with your energies, where you invest your little surpluses, where you regard as the safe places to draw on, for the emergency supplies, the ego-boosters, the reassurances, the need to feel loved or wanted. You know where they are don’t you? Are they safe places? Secure and promissory? Or like a squirrel with its nuts, are you just optimistic about finding some again? Few of these emotional energy repositories, these batteries, offer you more back than you put in. You have to keep charging, watching the indicator for low charge, and making sure you don’t end up in an awkward place with nowhere to plug in when the power fails.

Most of these emotional batteries that we charge up will naturally discharge when left alone. The friend you haven’t spoken to in a year, the wife you haven’t really thought about with flowers or a night out, or a pampered day, the partner you’ve assumed needed nothing more than your presence to be fulfilled and valued, the parent you haven’t thanked or the child you haven’t given time to really listen to. Haven’t we all been there too? We connect with the emotional battery – and it’s flat. No energy flows, or only a trickle.

And sometimes we charge up so much we do damage. This little netbook PC has a battery-saving option to only charge up 80 per cent so the battery will have a longer overall lifespan. Leave rechargeable batteries in the charger too long and they just get hot. More is going in than can be held, so it’s either resisted or turned into a different kind of energy. Some relationships are unwittingly overcharged like that too, over-invested in, so that instead of a balance of internal batteries and external, we become dependent on them, or our expectations of them.

The thing is, these external batteries are not part of us, but of other complex, independent and interconnected people. They do not exist for us. There are exchange deals and others invest in us, but we all know when an old promise feels now unrealistic, or we no longer have the influence they thought we had, and need. If we have conflicting loyalties, indecision and changing circumstances, so do they. So isn’t it just a bit dangerous too, to depend on these emotional investments too completely? The partner who cheats? The colleague with more ambition than loyalty? The child who needs to grow through an issue before they can be reasonable? Or you, and your changing perspective on life, and needs?

OK. So you have just lost a relationship on which you depended. Your love, your commitment is all charged up, and they have disconnected, or there is a loose connection and sparks. You know to avoid emotional electrocution you must let go. But all your emotional energy is still stored up there, in their battery. It’s sitting there with gleaming terminals where your wires belong. Go connect!

Yikes! One touch and what you thought was your invested energy instead is a shock that knocks you off your feet. What? My invested energy? I want some of that back, like it used to be. Why doesn’t this battery work? Suddenly the polarity isn’t what it was, the voltage (potential) seems changed, or the current unmatched. That battery is someone else. Why did you charge it? Was it for their benefit (I love you so, till the end of time), or was it for you (if I keep their love I’ll be safe, till the end of time)?

Unconditional love or regard isn’t like that. It’s the jump leads when your power is down, it’s your spontaneous, unthinking giving when another needs it. It’s always there, because the other has reserves by not over-investing and draining themselves. So what are you thinking now? Where and what do you want to invest outside yourself, and how much do you want to believe that you have enough love and emotional resources for yourself and to share? Like electricity, you can’t keep it long, but you can generate it.

Now look at those batteries. You don’t have to lose a single relationship just because you aren’t borrowing their batteries. But is there one you just feel you have to keep going back to, to see if it’s still charged up, there for you? Maybe it’s time just to let it discharge. Don’t touch it, save the shock and hurt. Do you need the emotional energy? Or do you need the person? Even if they hurt you? Don’t confuse the person and their effect on you, for love and true giving.

Friendships and love happen all the time, if you have the capacity to let them come and go, so watch where your insecurities are charging something up that isn’t for the other at all, but for you. An ex-lover with a battery all charged up with your energy may not want to hurt you, but can’t help it. You can. There is a time to refuse connection until complete discharge, during which you can review your whole policy of emotional energy investments. You are a net creator of continual love and of kindness, if only you can learn not to store too much in the wrong places.

It might leave you with a changed perception of what love is, of being loved, and of how others see you. No bad thing perhaps. I too have been someone’s battery, and my polarity meant everything. That was my value, that was their investment, and that was everything. I too had a lot of emotional energy invested in them, and that was my mistake too, when they simply unplugged and it all went dead. I could resort to a lot of insulation, or I could change my energy policy. I’m choosing the latter, and I’m ready to connect. As a generator.

Continue reading Risk of shock: emotional charge »

Care to leave a comment? »

Sex

  • Posted on January 12, 2013 at 12:18 am

Oh, sorry, haven’t I mentioned it before? No, it hasn’t a lot to do with gender I suppose. But this is one of those really niggly bits of the loss and attachment equation that I have yet to get my head around. It isn’t just friends and observers of trans* people who wonder about our sexuality when we transition, and it is admittedly confusing. Stuff yourself with hormones and you can’t be surprised if you feel a bit different. I don’t actually think it’s changed me a lot, apart from shunting my sex drive into a siding. I was never attracted in the slightest by another man, and I don’t believe that it was an aversion due to my feeling an outsider in the gender game. I just was never gay. But I was reflecting with my psychiatrist at Charing Cross before Christmas, that my acute need to have a girlfriend in my teens was as much the freedom to identify with female company as it was a directly sexual urge. I do know that I just felt safe to be with a girl, and less safe not to. My relationship with women must always have held that sense of safety in being me with them that was so different from feeling an outsider among men.

So what now? I have already admitted that the person who made me feel most a woman post-transition, was a man. That woke me up to the possibility that intimacy with a man was no longer out of the question, and it wasn’t just losing an aversion. What if I was actually loved by a man? Well, I may never know! A lesbian friend pointed out that I am not exactly presenting as a lesbian myself either, rather as a very ordinary, if slightly elegant, middle-aged woman. And yet (though maybe it is just experience over a lifetime) it is the way women love that still comforts me most.

Which brings me back to attachment and its relation to attraction.

Do people really only form real attachments so they can have sex? It certainly is very bonding, and I guess when you have had sex with the same person maybe more than five thousand times, and can’t remember more than one or two times when it wasn’t a wonderful and lovely thing to share, you must be pretty firmly bonded. But I guess it is just as true that if another person isn’t attractive, or ceases to be so, then it isn’t as obvious to have sex and bond. But lots of things make people unattractive, from illness to behaviour to age. Oh, and switching their gender presentation. So is sexual attraction the electromagnetism of attachment? Switch it off and everything falls apart?

What really happens to attachment, and what have you lost? A sex partner? Or a real partner with whom you bonded through sex? What were you attached to – just the attractive part? And was the attachment dependent on sexual bonding?

This has quite floored me, because for all my letting-go ruminations in a previous blog (to be continued) I am still searching for one good reason to wave 32 very good years of partnership goodbye. Does sexual intimacy have to depend on a binary idea? Or can attraction be learned (if you want to, of course), and just as being old and wrinkly or impotent need not stop people loving each other – and being wonderfully comforting and intimate – can late transition be a process of learning wonderful and loving things over again? (Simply because the other person is valued, even lovely in their own right?)

Maybe it is a case of not seeing the wood for the trees, because we have been conditioned, and have conditioned ourselves to see the obvious. My attitude to life has increasingly become one of ‘why not?’. It has always been the way I work, but even more now, the way I think about self-expression. I really did think that partnership and intimacy could survive, that new things could be learned and that things that felt nice to do before, since they would be done the same way and feel the same, could go on being done. But I guess I was looking at the wood. (Look, I’m sorry, if that’s a double entendre for you, if so, just think ‘forest’! – or is that just as bad?)

Looking back on the past ten months and my complete loss of any intimacy, let alone anything remotely sexual, I can’t help realising what a proportionately small part sex actually played. I don’t think it helped me go to work, drive safely, fix the house or mow the grass, or enjoy a night out for a meal or a film. I miss both intimacy and partnership. The complete absence of intimacy is desperately hard for me; it’s like sensory deprivation and at times is a torture. The company can be filled in, and I have enjoyed the company of lovely friends since living alone. I am free to spontaneously change plans, see who I like and when, entertain and be entertained, and be with women without fear of it looking like an affair. But in the end, that 32 years of daily communication, reassuring and being reassured, being welcomed and welcoming, listening and being heard, ended abruptly just because I would never have been chosen as a sexual partner as a woman, feels bewildering and nonsensical. To me. I don’t miss it, I miss us.

The eyes have it

It is a real irony that people say what lovely eyes I have. They like the way I do my make-up, but they say my eyes show who I am, and are feminine. But they really are the same eyes. I don’t do anything different with them! I seem to remember that it was my eyes that were attractive in the beginning, long before I took any clothes off. And I can’t help thinking that a lot of the way I have always been, as a partner, as a lover, even as a parent, was always a part and expression of what I am seen to be now. So some essence of Andie the woman was part of being attractive. Certainly I was different in many ways, a bit unusual. But so long as it was a different kind of man, that was OK.

So I am still stumped. How can I ever be attractive enough to generate the kind of bonding that might create partnership and attachment? Because I haven’t a clue. Everything I believed has been undermined by experience. I gave everything, and suddenly nothing was good enough. When I say ‘bewildered’, that is what I mean. It feels like arriving, but finding yourself alone in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to get you out. Not even a map.

Sex? It doesn’t just mean fucking, to me; it means expressing love through affection, intimacy, touch, arousal and the greatest tenderness with the greatest vulnerability. Will I ever experience that again, if the element of attraction has gone forever, even with someone I knew so well for so long? And will I ever know real attachment again? Or is attachment itself a bad thing? Is partnership something else, that I have never really understood, that is a lesser thing than I thought?

Somehow I lost everything, and I don’t even know if I am allowed to expect even a shadow of what I had ever again. I just didn’t realise that I needed a wholly unambiguous gender identity in order to have that kind of personal value.

So here we are. Sex? Partnership? Commitment? I am bewildered, though of course to you it might just all be so obvious you wonder why I even think these things …

Continue reading Sex »

1 comment »

Loss and letting go (1)

  • Posted on December 30, 2012 at 5:44 pm

They aren’t there. The books. There are now only mine, not the ones about attachment and loss. By John Bowlby – who asserted that to deal with these things we had to know and understand our past. How bloody ironic! It’s my discovery that has caused the loss and grief of such a profound attachment.

That sounds bitter. Only sort of; but it is high time I processed this stuff, so I think it will take a few blogs over time to get there. Somehow this week I have been surrounded by people and events and other writings, that are all about why loss and attachment is so difficult, and how it ruins lives that can’t move on.

Last week I watched an old episode of ‘Lewis’ (UK police drama featuring a lot of doing what’s best as much a what’s right). In this one, a father with two young daughters feels his only way out of shame (not his own) is to kill himself and take them with him. Well, jumping out of the top window of the British Museum, wasn’t going to happen really, was it? No. The daughters are saved, he jumps, and is caught by Inspector Lewis’ sidekick, the intellectual Hathaway. He and the man grasp each other’s wrist as the man dangles over the assembled crowd. Hathaway somehow knows the man doesn’t actually want to die. Surely he wouldn’t be hanging on if he did? Stupidly/heroically Hathaway releases his grip to convince the man that he has chosen to hold on and survive. If the man had decided to go, of course, he would have dropped. His choice. Now affirmed in his decision, the man is hauled back to safety.

This is the way we like it to be.

Holding on is instinctive, and letting go is a product of decision. Maybe you have no more strength? Is letting go a sign of weakness, just a giving in? Does holding on hurt? If you are holding onto something hot, sharp, spiky, constrictive, then it would be a relief, and if you fall having lost your fingers, why didn’t you let go sooner? Letting go is a positive act of recognising loss as what it is. So why is that so hard? Maybe you feel that someone is letting you go and they should not: that you are such a benefit to them and they don’t realise it. That’s a hard one, isn’t it? It isn’t our call, truly. Loyalty, commitment, faithfulness are essentials to love and to life itself. But there is a world of difference between the altruistic refusal to leave someone ill or injured or old when they are not wanting to be a burden or even a danger. That is your choice. But just because you love someone who may have loved you even intensely, doesn’t mean you can hang around on their wrist thinking it’s in their best interests. No. It’s about you, isn’t it?

This Christmas I had to conclude that letting go my love is my responsibility. And that means understanding the loss so that I can let go well and with good grace, for my own sake. Am I resisting out of hope that love has not actually gone? That being a man was not really a prerequisite for the eligibility of being kissed? That somehow it may dawn that I really am the same person and all will be forgiven? The loss I resist is the cold hard fact that I am no longer desirable, and whatever I feel, that part is not my call. Yes, right now, there is no-one in my world that actually wants to hold me, comfort me, love me, be intimate with me, and in that way validate and affirm and trust me.

This is what I do not want to know.

And yes, I can believe it all began with my mother, and that from the start, I was a nuisance. A necessary one, a deliberately-generated one, but nonetheless a bit of a burden. I spoilt my mother’s young life as much as I enhanced it. It’s true: as soon as you find love you also find rejection. As a parent, you like the gurgle, but not the poo. That winning smile, but not the tantrum in the wine bottle aisle. The moment they fall sweetly asleep, but not the bawling at 2 am. From the start: will we ever really be able to trust anyone? And can we survive without unconditional love? Even if you find it, you will never really know that is the case. Unconditional love is a hypothesis we spend our lives testing. The science is inconclusive, as they say; more research is needed.

This is the heart of loss: the possibility of replacement. You can never replace a parent or child, so you deal with the loss in an appropriate way. Parents go, a spouse remains, you are protected and loved, it is enough. You can tell yourself that a life was complete, well-lived, fulfilled, and that helps. A young life seems such a waste, and we may rationalise the perfection of their short life. The lost one has gone, and we are safe to gild memories, keep the photos, perfect the shared love, remember and preserve. There is mental replacement in a way unavailable to those with relatives gone missing.

We all had romances when young, and some have had affairs when older, and most of us know what it is to break up at a point that wasn’t just the fading of rose petals. We moved on best when there was another love; another lilypad to jump to. Or at least were happy when we found another after a short cold swim. We sustained our beliefs in ourselves that we were desirable, lovable – and dismissed our loss as ‘it’s their loss’. Even leaving a loving parental home was probably best survived by having a boyfriend or girlfriend, especially if parents were becoming a nuisance who didn’t understand our needs – just like they felt when we were born.

Really dealing with loss, really letting go, means something else. It means when there is no-one to catch you, no replacement or substitute, no affirmation of your desirability or personal value, and you are letting go something you really do still want but that will never be what you want – you are not killing yourself, or even part of yourself.

OK. Shut up Hathaway and stop intellectualising or your wrist will snap. This feels bad, but I am beginning to understand that I really am alone in this world and that I have not lost unconditional love. It was never there. In truth my feet are inches from the grass, and like it or not I have to walk away. It isn’t night, and it isn’t sunset, it’s just grass. There is nowhere greener, but at least I am allowed to walk on it. No-one is holding me, I have to let go. I don’t lose anything by letting go; I lost that some while back.

To be continued …

Continue reading Loss and letting go (1) »

Care to leave a comment? »