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Touching, isn’t it?

  • Posted on October 28, 2013 at 1:03 pm

It’s a cultural thing – who touches whom, when, how and why. I have relaxed into being a whole lot more touchy-feely recently. As a woman, in England, I feel OK touching someone’s arm in conversation, greeting or saying goodbye with a hug. I was never allowed to do that as a man, lest it be misinterpreted, even by me. OK, sometimes I did, but not as a regular thing. When a man touches a woman’s arm or leg, it’s either a presumption, an advance, or it’s effeminate. Hugs before always had that constraint: not too warm, not too close, not too long. Air-kissing only.

It’s as if physical contact is largely reserved for sexual intimacy. Singular hugs are remembered: the last hug with my wife, the last hug with my daughter, a special hug one Christmas with someone I felt deeply for. The kiss that could have led to a mistaken journey. A French kiss that was so needed, but never again repeated. I’ve often written about my yearning for intimacy, for the next ‘real’ kiss that means more than friends, the hand in a place no-one else has touched for a very long time.

And yet now I am learning something quite new through the dance and the people I meet there. Human touch, understood differently, is nurturing, healing, and increases self-awareness and wholeness. In a small group this week, we explored self-awareness in the body to its six extents: fingertips, toes, head and tail. Yes, you know, those little bones at the end of your spine that are free to wiggle. This week involved touching the tail.

Isn’t it funny, the way we ignore parts of ourselves in Western society? Men have breasts, just undeveloped and unspoken about. But they are there and sensate. We have navels that have inner connections and psychological significance, and the most we do is pierce them. Women’s breasts are sexualised, yet they are so much more than erogenous zones. Men don’t communicate that they hold their penises many times a day, and the conversational barrier between men and women, even between women and women about vaginas, leaves everyone communicating poorly. We have a sense of at least some taboo about things we all deal with throughout every day of our lives, not in the one per cent or less time spent in sexual activity. There are things we value and enjoy, and yet pretend they don’t exist or aren’t really part of our enjoyed lives.

I am learning how much is lost in the separation of sensory and sensual experience from communal life, and its exclusive adoption into single-partner expression. No, I haven’t gone all swingy and free-love – far from it. I am just touching other people, and they are touching me, and we are understanding its importance. We are communicating a shared awareness in a way I never found possible before. There are always caveats in our dance, that if the other isn’t comfortable with a touch, it is avoided. We don’t get to really intimate erogenous zones, because that would raise ambiguities, but we still talk about it and respect each other. Many other animals regularly touch, hug, groom each other, and it is bonding. We as Western humans have lost a lot to supposed correctness, fear of taking advantage, and loss of trust.

You can’t tickle yourself. And you can’t hug yourself. A duvet and a cuddly toy may be comforting, but it is not a hug. An orgasm may be a beautiful experience, but it’s all the touching, skin contact and caressing that creates an awareness of mutual trust and love. And I have found that there is another non-sexual layer of physical contact between people that is simply shared awareness of who and what we are, without which we are only partly aware. So I am really liking my new community of people who touch and hug, who make contact in dance, who will pull and push legs and arms, wiggle a tail bone, and who will invigorate, or stroke, and remind me of my extension in all directions as a living being.

Could I have found this before? It’s a difficult question. I know I would have felt the same in myself, but I know it wouldn’t have fitted with life as I knew it. And now, I know that this is exploration I always wanted but never found, not even in my marriage.

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National coming out day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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Obsession and an open door

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self?

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

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

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

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

Reasons for obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An open door

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

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

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

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Calling time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dancing free

  • Posted on August 31, 2013 at 11:00 pm

This week’s main blog was a bit philosophical, and stemmed from a conversation I’ve been having about gender essentialism and the determining factors in gender identity.

But that isn’t where my life is at, and it has been a really varied week.

It began in fear of feeling suicidal again. Just that deep gnawing, unrelenting fear that I have arrived in a place where I can never find another who will love me. That there never can be an intimacy again because everyone out there only feels safe with (or at least strongly prefers) a partner of determinate gender with a determinate history. And I shall and can never be that.

It is the most awful feeling of being an utter outcast in the world of love and intimacy. And yet love and intimacy is like air to me. I am suffocating right now, simply for want of love. It is framed in an awareness of friends who know just what to do. They go the places they used to (before the last relationship), they go on dating sites, the other parties know what to expect, and they start sifting. Kiss enough frogs and they will find their prince/ss. There are rules, they follow them roughly, they will succeed.

I have no such place, no such expectations, no such rules. I am not just suffocating, I feel utterly lost.

Even my garbled squeaks for help on Facebook were largely ignored, except a very dear friend actually called me to see I was alright. It didn’t take much, but it meant everything to me.

Come midweek, and I had an interesting and understanding chat with someone over the difficulty I have, in being asked or instructed to dress (mostly) male for a particular reason. In the above context, it might be understandable that I find this psychologically a very risky thing to attempt. But it also transpired that my transsexuality is not immediately apparent to everyone concerned, and despite my willingness to speak of it, the slight feeling of flattery added a hint of a silk purse in this sow’s ear.

I cannot say that this time is an easy one. The anxieties over buying a flat and selling a house without being there, and the last weeks of being married slipping fast away, don’t sit well with feeling the outcast from human intimacy. Believe me, being torn out of the love of someone you’ve spent your life with simply for being what you are, is the most gut-wrenching event you can go through. This blog is no longer a means of communication between us either. Now it is just me and you, continuing the exchanges of ‘life beyond diagnosis’. There is no play, no pretend, no fighting-to-keep, no misunderstanding, no fear of ‘what if I am?’. And no more believing that I could ever live a dual-gendered life, even for the best reasons on the world. This is the certainty of being born with gender incongruence, and the consequences. It matters, it really matters, that I am not a man after all. And yet, despite the fact that I live and move in this world, everywhere, without any question of not being a woman, albeit a different sort, when it comes to finding romance and love, maybe I am not a woman enough. Is everyone just looking for genitals?!

It is a raw time in some ways. And so I was glad to finish the week and head off for a Friday night of dance. Five Rhythms, or similar events in the summer break, means two hours solid of barefoot, expressive dance, with interactions with random other dancers as partners for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before dancing solo again. There is no speaking, only very free dance. I was determined to dance out my anxieties, fears, resentments, and the horrors of being unlovable. It’s that yawning awfulness that maybe some while ago I had the last loving sexual encounter of my life.

And I think if I really did know that, if that was a certain outcome of becoming my very best – as this – I seriously would want to end right here.

But we won’t go there, because it’s a horrible and scary thought, and what I really wanted to say was that someone, out of the blue, touched my spirit after the dance. I had a few beautiful encounters during the dancing, but it was sitting in the circle afterwards when this person, next to me, shared their own sudden realisation that being different was OK. F**king OK!! With a determination to let go of a lifetime’s angst at the behest of others, and be that ‘being of light’ that we all can manifest. That touched me, because I had gone that night to drive out the bad, rather than simply to let it go and move into a place of dynamic living.

We went on to have a long chat about the similarities in our life experiences, and suffice it to say, if she had said she’d been sent by an angel, I would have believed her. It wasn’t sympathy, it was possibilities, out of understanding each other, that life as we each need it, is possible; that it can be claimed if only we let go and trust.

What a week, after returning to my roots last week (A stitch in time) and facing living alone again. I put it down also to hormonal cycles, though it may be coincidence! It reminds me that I still walk close to the edge sometimes, and that I must simply trust that higher powers that may have kept me safe in every other way, can help me find real loving again sometime ahead.

So thank you to three people this week who have helped pull me back from the brink. If any of you are reading this, you make a difference to me just by being a bit more than just accepting. I am strong, but even strong people sometimes fall over edges. It’s the gravity, you know.

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