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Conversations

  • Posted on July 6, 2014 at 9:51 am

Cat

This week I had a conversation with a cat. I had gone to deliver a birthday card to be delivered by my former wife to my daughter who lives I know not where. I don’t even know if the envelope will be opened. Who else would send a card in an envelope written in purple with just her name? Will her partner suggest she opens it? Just to see? My guess is that they never mention me to each other. I wonder what the conversation would be if they did? There was no message, only love and happy birthday.

Anyway, I stepped out of my car to meet my old cat, a ginger tom, one of two, which I do miss. I tickled his ears as I always did, squeaked as I always did, talked to him and told him how I missed him. He was appreciative and did all the right things. I must have given him a full five minutes before ringing the bell. I handed the card, she took it. No smile or welcome, just an uncertain holding of the front door, shooing the cat out as he tried to go in. She explained, after repeated attempts to set the cat on his way in any other direction but this, that this was a spitting-image neighbour cat, not ‘mine’.

There was no real conversation; our last evening out had been ‘difficult’. I left, feeling like the cat. He looked the same and was rejected for not being the right one. I don’t look the same, and was rejected even though I was the right one.

Friend

I spent a delightful morning with a friend from Bristol. After friending on Facebook largely because I already had met her daughters, this father (yes, that’s right), a professional surgeon, was coming over to Brighton and we agreed to meet. What made the conversation lively was in part due to my book of poetry Realisations, which she found thoughtful, evocative, even helpful. But more than that, here was someone happy to live as I at first had, in a dual role, male and female. This I found fascinating, because I remember those days, when I too asked permission to be female in certain spaces, because I didn’t want to cause offence or alienate, whilst inside I was screaming to be allowed out. My friend does it very well, and will never follow the same route as I have. Her daughter joined us for lunch, and we had a lovely time together: one bisexual, one transgender dual-role parent and one transitioned transsexual friend of both. None of us had any difficulty with this, and no shortage of conversation.

And this father, this respected professional, had told me of their being outed by The Sun newspaper. A deliberate attempt to sensationalise being transgender in order to invite rejection and ridicule.

Support group

There is an invaluable drop-in support group in Brighton for gender-questioning people of all ages, called the Clare Project. Once a month I have the option of joining them for an evening meal out in Brighton. Thankfully there are plenty of places in Brighton that do not mind a very motley crew of maybe 30 gender-questioning and transitioned people. And we are diverse. This week, as ‘my last’, I made the effort to go along, even though I make no effort these days to inhabit trans spaces. I bumped into someone I only knew on Facebook, recognised them easily (early days) and was not recognised because they had felt accosted by just a woman in the street. But the evening was a chance to meet my favourite trans man, there was someone who went my way at the same hospital just a I was coming out, and a friend who joined the group soon after me. There were others who are moving nicely along, as well as a few cis folk friends and partners, and some non-transitioners. I did say diverse …

We don’t just talk about gender things; we have real lives. But we do have things in common, such as broken families, loss of affection, triumphs and loneliness, battles with ignorant people, even difficulties finding an income or a friendly place to live. I was just high on the excitement of impending closure, full of energy.

My trans man friend said how much he simply missed cuddles. Me too. We hugged.

Work

I was passed over for a job opportunity that I wanted, and that I could quite easily have done. I felt a judgement against me was unfair. I checked it out with colleagues in sporadic conversations, and they felt the same. I wondered whether my first year in this first job as a woman had tainted my record, and reflected on how the past two years have changed me. I had walked in just weeks after transitioning from ever expressing as male again, into a new corporate environment led by and full of men. To consult and advise. I got a contract, then a job. As a trans woman (everyone was told). In a wig and silicone boobs. I got on with it, survived inhabiting an entirely male office, found my feet (albeit with a slightly belligerent side to assert my non-maleness), and went through months when I cried all the way to work as my life fell apart, rejected by family and ultimately beginning a single life away from all I held dear. Including the cats.

I had this conversation with my current manager, who is now to be replaced as my manager by the person who got the job I wanted. I am one layer further down the organisation, just as I am craving to rise again! I related how I know what it is like to be a woman at work. But also a man among men, with those expectations. An advantage? Certainly eye-opening from both sides. And I reflected with her how the two years had treated me, and how newly-empowered I now feel. When I return to work and complete my healing, I shall have left behind all requests for permission and proofs for the existence of me as a woman. This will be a real difference, and the future is wide open to me. I have grasped responsibility for my own life, found my own authenticity, and I shall never give it away again.

This kind of conversation has an honesty I could never previously have expressed at work.

The world

It has also been an interesting week of online conversation. Brynn Tannehill wrote in the Huffington Post this week about the very thing I have blogged, regarding family treatment of transitioning parents, partners, children, and how the sheer distaste is boosted by public othering of transgender people. This is transphobia: unlike many other phobias it is fear. Fear that there is something horribly odd about us, corrupting and changing anyone who comes close. Yes, I too am ‘icky’ when it comes to imagining affection and intimacy with me. You might have fucked someone for decades, lovingly, passionately. But now as trans? Yuk!

Then Julie Bindel launched her new book, with a chapter on sexuality being a choice. A good time to launch this, being Pride season. But aside from her complete misunderstanding of gender dysphoria (if she believe it exists at all) here she has she muddled what may be her own bisexuality, with being simply lesbian or gay. It is interesting to know what the causality of any sexuality or gender identity is, but it must never be used to define people in or out of existence. There is to be a debate/discussion featuring Julie Bindel, Qazi Rahman, Stella Duffy, Patrick Strudwick and Kira Cochrane, which I am sure will be fascinating, but I don’t seriously think we know very much. Who knows whether the cause of being lesbian by nature is the same as that of being gay? Or whether there is any link at all between gender and sexuality, or whether the origins are of a completely different kind.

What I do know is that Paul McHugh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, and who still asserts that people like me are suffering a psychological disorder and delusion, is wrong. I can tell you whether gender confirmation surgery (or genital reconstruction, or whatever) is a final cure, in just two weeks time. Right now, I already have no doubt.

If anyone said, ‘you can have all the love and affection in the world again, if only you keep your bits’ I would say no. Some of my conversations have been bad, most good. But it is my conversation that really counts, not anyone else’s opinion. And my conversation decides who I might meet, work with, love, even (I can hope) fuck, without it being icky.

These are just a week’s conversations, but at least people are talking, and little by little, some understanding is growing.

A colleague (yes, you!) expressed the hope that I would keep writing after my surgery. Yes, of course. There are too many conversations to ignore, and anyway, I was born like this: a writer.

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Getting there

  • Posted on June 21, 2014 at 11:32 pm

My personal motto over the past few years has been ‘I’m getting there!’

Partly, it has been recognition of slow and steady progress, partly it has been self-reassurance when another day goes by and nothing has happened. Now ‘getting there’ means just a few more weeks, and then nowhere particularly to get to. I shall re-evaluate where ‘next’ might mean, in completely different terms. First, simply healing and gaining confidence in my body again, but after that it will be things like: what work can I best do or find that will make a contribution to my pension before it’s too late. And perhaps, how might I find love and romance again? Some things will continue, such as facial electrolysis … But there’s no story in that!

‘Getting there’ also means that this blog may also change. I may not write every week, or it may be occasionally reflective but with more poetry. I think what I have liked about getting here, is that I have met other people along the way, helped a few, and learned so much. Have I said it all, with regards the male to female transition? Three years ago, information was on the Internet to be found, but social media groups were fewer than they are now. Sometimes it seems everyone who successfully transitions has an urge to set up another page, write another book, start another group. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be more openness, and hopefully, more acceptance. Some people have suggested that I create a book out of this blog, and I might. Distilled down, perhaps I can take a different angle on the whole business of gender self-identification and the impact on other people.

Meanwhile, the next few weeks (I was advised to be busy, very busy!) will be strange. I still have a few important things to prepare, people I want to see, things to write and concerts to play. And I have refused to allow anything to interfere with dance. Mercifully, my decapeptyl (testosterone-blocker) dosage runs through to surgery. The three-monthly jab will have been almost exactly three months ago, so it means no rush of testosterone coming unwelcome at the last. (Never have I been more grateful for a drug than this.) Already, I have had to drop the oestrogen, because it holds a thrombosis risk in surgery. How my body will feel for the next six weeks without it I don’t yet know, but I will be very glad to be back on it. It will also be almost exactly a year since I was given official and full dosage, and in that time my body has significantly changed in its overall shape – not just breast growth, but waist and hips. I like what I see in the mirror (well, from that point up) and my legs are good. This is what ‘getting there’ has also meant.

And perhaps strangely, excitement lives with me. I say strangely, because this is major surgery, and as I explain my forthcoming absence to people who don’t know what is being done, they look terribly worried, and then I excitedly say not to, because it isn’t life-threatening! But I don’t explain. After all, I’m only ‘getting there’. Every time my ‘bits’ get in the way, feel awkward or painfully squished, I know it isn’t for much longer; and it simply feels good, very good. I’m so looking forward to looking in the mirror, naked, in less than one month’s time. And to simple things like my knickers fitting properly (!), and dancing in leggings, or wearing a swimsuit.

Encounters remind me of the distance travelled: people who notice my body looks different. Today I came across a photo of me and my former wife when she ran the Brighton marathon just three years ago. I wondered who the rather unattractive grey-headed bloke was, standing next to her, as I stared at the thumbnail icon on the computer. Enlarged, he was wearing an unfamiliar tee-shirt: ‘Proud husband of …’, thoughtfully procured by my since-estranged daughter. And then there was a photo of my last Christmas with wife and son. Who was the bulgy bloke with longer grey hair? And how could he have been attractive to the woman next to him? And I realise that she may find another similar to take my place. If that’s what she wanted, well, I am a long way away from that.

Other encounters are much simpler now; the poet who took the trouble to find and contact me to express appreciation – which was mutual. The dancer in tears from the emotional experience of a very shared dance with me. The busker who sang just the right song as I was passing, leaving me in deep, quiet tears in the middle of the street. The German lesbian visitor who described me to a friend as a strong woman. And all those who don’t know what ‘getting there’ means to me, as I arrange my two months’ absence. My masseuse who kneads my body back into shape each month, who has been so supportive over ten years and shares my gratitude for this journey.

If anything, I feel this week like someone who has run a marathon, who is walking the final yards because the time no longer matters, it’s not about the clock, just about getting there.

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Light at the end

  • Posted on June 14, 2014 at 2:21 pm
Are you just realising that you are transgendered? It may be a joy for some. For most of us it is unstoppable and scary. What are you going to do, at the point where it seems unmanageable, and potentially starting on a long journey with a lot of change. I never said it was easy, but here’s a view from the other end of the tunnel.

October 2010, and a man in smart-casual clothes and close-cropped grey, receding hair is sorting through the sale rack in a quality store. He’s forgotten about being surreptitious, and given up thinking about how this seems. He is buying his first skirt and feels he just isn’t going to stop himself any more. In the back of his mind, he knows something is changing forever. A recess of sadness is a shadow on the relief he feels, because there is no way he is going to be able to explain this. At this point he doesn’t even know that he is transgender, that there is a diagnosis for this, that it is normal for people born like him. That there are thousands of people within a few miles radius of this store, who were born the same.

He will go home and hide his purchases and wait for a coming weekend when family will be away. His daughter and wife are having a girls’ weekend in London. He is defined out of his own family. And he will be a girl for the weekend. There is no fantasy or fetish attached to this, and in the end he will confess. That he bought a skirt and jumper, spent a couple of days wearing them. That he simply felt perfect. And will realise with joy and horror that ‘he’ is not appropriate. The realisation will come tumbling in, and very quickly ‘transgender’ will enter his vocabulary. He will gradually begin talking about being both genders, dual gendered, two-spirit, a normal trans person, and soon, very soon, acknowledge that he is she, take on a female name, use it online, acquire a separate email address, and turn the page.

The acknowledgements page faces the contents page, and the chapter titles are frightening. She is seeing unfamiliar headings and can no longer close the book. Months will become years, in which she will write every week about this journey. It will be Andie’s Place. This will be the hardest journey in her 55-year life, traumatic and filled with grief, anxiety, the need for constant justification and she will lose completely the life and family she has loved and depended on.

 

It is now June 2014, one month away from the end of the procurement of change. She will grow and leave the journey behind, having learned so much more about life, about love, about being different. There is nothing more to ask for, or persuade others about. No-one to stand in her way of personal identity and fulfilment. No reason to stand out, or defend. No special service, no professionals as gatekeepers to her life. She will awake from anaesthesia, euphoric. Several weeks of pain and then a few months with discomfort will simply have to be borne, but with a now-familiar gratitude for closure.

The feeling she has is, yes, relief. The realisation of being transgendered – and then that transition is a lengthy process, not an event – has become clearer, as being a journey with an end. Her history will include all her life events: a slightly incongruous mix of experiences, expectations, conditioning, confusion, fatherhood and womanhood, constraint and freedom, that is rich, unusual, but integrated.

Her conversation will change perceptibly, because the one pursuit that has driven her life for so long will be achieved. Her poetry has already changed, its voice being still reflective, but outwards. Her dance has changed, having developed out of nothing. Her movements have noticeably lost their defensive, protective and escaping shapes, and now she skates, swims and flies, extended fully in the space.

Her employment is still good, but she is realising that stepping back and down, as a comfort and space within which to find herself, is a frustration to her leadership instincts. Working as a woman has been interesting, from encounters where men don’t expect her to have an answer, let alone a correct one, to those where she is simply not quite equal – or conversely where being transsexual is a good enough reason to expect differently from her than an ‘ordinary’ woman.

Life has come not exactly full circle, because whilst back in the real and ordinary world, ‘real and ordinary’ have been redefined. It has been a spiral, thankfully upwards.

With the end in sight, her message to anyone feeling they are at the beginning of this story, is that whilst the journey feels unavoidable, dark, destructive even, it is not a blind alley. The tunnel may at times be water-filled, but you can hold your breath long enough. It may be dark with no light at the end visible, but it is only a bend. There is only one person in this particular tunnel, because all are diferent. And that person is you. It may seem lonely, because no-one else can walk, crawl or swim this way with you. There may be blockages to worm around, or currents in the water that throw you about. But there is no reason to die in here, or to despair and give up simply because it is dark and unknown. People may be unkind, even cruel. Many will never understand. But they are not what matters. You entered this place not knowing what it would be like. The entrance seemed big enough to engulf you. As you leave, and you will, the way out will seem small, because you will have grown. It will be quiet, leafy, green and bright, undisturbed by thrashing limbs and protests. No-one fights to get out, because the air and light and freshness is simply welcoming and wonderful.

She still remembers him, and why he is no more. Not dead, transformed, made real. He received love for being him, but it was at enormous cost. Now she is only known for being real. Love may still seem a world away, but the world is loving in all those spaces that mean most. Being appreciated for music, for writing and for dancing is a wonderful confirmation of her personhood. Above all, among women, she finally and fully belongs.

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Funny numbers

  • Posted on June 7, 2014 at 10:57 pm

Hanging on in there? Still reading my blog after all this time? Maybe you’re waiting for the juicy stuff before finally giving up? (Maybe I am!) Well, life is certainly interesting, even though I’ve lived in a bubble of my own since 2010, when it first dawned on me that I wasn’t actually some kind of weird unspeakable pervert living inside a ‘nice bloke’ persona.

I wasn’t a ‘nice bloke’ at all. That’s only what everyone else thought.

Last week I was coming to terms with the emotional build-up as I hit the six week mark; today I noticed it is just 40 days to go. The headache hasn’t completely gone, so it may not just have been stress at all. The fear is quite under control.

But these numbers are small, as I reflect on the scale and speed of things. Soon after I started my journey, media accounts of gender dysphoria were almost entirely sensationalist, and the first big thing landing in my marital living room (scary) was Channel 4’s My Transsexual Summer. In the three years since, a number of younger trans* personalities have emerged, written, acted, performed, interviewed and been recognised around the world. Musicians, actors, authors, journalists have used their professions to present being transgender or transsexual as simply one of the diverse outcomes of birth.

During the same time many hundreds of trans* people worldwide have been murdered for being trans*. Each year the Transgender Day of Remembrance has counted them, named them, remembered them. The media have broadcast and published the most appalling stories, even resulting in the death of trans* individuals. The public, such as parents at schools, have treated children, parents and teachers with incredible bigotry, as bullies. All over the world trans* people have lost everything, including hope, because society has proved unready to see the world and humanity as it is. Religious bigotry has been vile and violent.

Small change

And yet in this same three-year span, we have seen the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 in the UK, and many states in the US fighting this way and that to legalise it. Yet trans* people still feel marginalised as a special case. Lesbian and gay ‘rights to love’ are also terribly recent, and Section 28, legislating against teaching the acceptability of same-sex love only disappeared in 2003. Trans* people are still a step behind.

In a few weeks my prepared envelope receives its final insert, and goes off to request my Gender Recognition Certificate. This possibility only arrived in 2005, and still I have had to go through the mill of psychiatrists and an unsupported two years of so-called ‘real life experience’. Are you lesbian, or gay? Did you ever have to prove it to a string of psychiatrists in order to be believed, or validated? Was it ever in anyone else’s gift to pronounce you lesbian or gay? Do you need a certificate? Were you ever written in stone as heterosexual at birth? Have you ever had to tick a ‘homosexual’ box on a form? I set out on this journey to freedom to be myself just five years after legal permission to declare your own gender became possible.

These are the small numbers.

And the really big numbers?

The really big numbers are those identifying as transgender. Even narrowed down to strictly transsexual as in my diagnosis, 2% to 5% is a conservative estimate. That is what, about 12 million people worldwide? None of whom are believed and trusted for being who they say they are, administrated out of existence until extensively tested against subjective means. And perhaps a majority of these will never be fully accepted.

Zooming back in again, I am in one of the fewer countries where that is possible. I live in a city where there is above average tolerance, I have had a comparatively easy route through three years to achieve where I am, and in 40 days I shall have a few hours surgery, and then I shall feel completely at one with myself. And single.

Afterthought

Just to lighten up, I went shopping today. Pre-hospital and recovery stuff, so in the spirit of a first and a second, here we go, because they made me smile.

For the first time I needed to buy sanitary products. Post-surgical care you understand (the surgery isn’t that complete!). And yet it felt perfectly normal, and such a far cry from the anxiety buying my first female clothing ‘as a (nice) bloke’ in 2010.

For the second time in my life, I needed to go to Mothercare, for a baby changing mat. Decisions! Pink? Blue? Well, not the one with the matching bib … And would madam (proud grandma?) like to leave her email for future offers …? No; I don’t expect to be back. (For those not in the know, this is a matter of wipe-clean convenience for post-surgical aftercare.)

Nothing like a sense of reality, is there? Big numbers and little numbers can both be important, if difficult to compare.

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O god, Godot

  • Posted on June 2, 2014 at 9:05 pm

I was in Ghent this last weekend, with a concert band. I’d been really looking forward to this trip, though I think now that I had also been seeing it as a marker on the calendar. It was a big thing coming, to be enjoyed, and probably the last big commitment before my surgical date. Unconsciously, it was a curtain to pass through, a last normality almost. I spent the entire weekend with a tension headache that seized my head, neck and back and refused to let go in the face of all medications. Have you ever sat in the middle of a concert band with timpani behind you, pumping out fortissimo on the trumpet? OK, you get the picture! Surprisingly, the focus of playing helped, and I wasn’t in a heap at the end of each gig. My room mate very sensibly observed that I had been through a lot of emotional stuff of late, and suggested that my body was reacting, and very kindly acceded to my request for a bit of a back massage to get me going in the mornings. But I did still bring this terrible and disabling tension head back with me, at midnight, after several very long days.

On the first night I just wanted to drop, but we had a meal booked for the whole party, and it took two and a half hours to be served. We all left before desserts in the end, with great upset with the terrible service. It wasn’t good for my head or emotions, and I wasn’t even drinking beer.

The next day I passed a restaurant called, more appropriately, ‘Allegro Moderato’! Maybe we should have gone there. And then, the ‘Grande Cafe Godot’ … we should have been grateful!

I did churn my thoughts at night while away. Not doubts, but what I should have acknowledged was fear. No, it hasn’t gone away, nor has the headache. But I was taken by surprise, since no-one talks about this stage. I have neither machismo, nor bravado, and nothing with which to brush this aside. Just waiting. Waiting not for permission, agreement, or recognition, but for something I have been offered and something I have chosen. Six weeks, this week; it feels interminable! This is the ‘elective’ bit. Well, the alternative is no better, it just has no event attached to it. I had no choice than to make a choice, and it has been a choice that few would welcome! And certainly one that no non-trans person can understand. That means there are few people to turn to. I have one friend though, who has been through this, and it was a great relief that she voiced it: fear. You are allowed to find and feel fear. I am scared, scared of pain, of being kept away from work, with no firm definition of how long, or of how my healing will go. Some sail through this, most have at least minor issues that linger on, and at every stage I could be feeling quite alone and uncertain of my body. Again, this is what I mean by being human being as a very lonely thing.

So rather than dwell on it right now, I do just want to say, for the record, that just because you have to do something that makes you feel right, doesn’t mean it does’t frighten you half to death. Fear happens. Fear has to be faced, not as a strong enemy, but as a presence. What I must equally not pretend, is that the fear isn’t there. And if this is you, in a similar place, be ready for it. I hope you have a loved one to hold your hand, if not, find at least one person strong enough to listen and simply be there. Again, with one friend, I am lucky.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting – just not for Godot, thank goodness.

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