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Name changing

  • Posted on April 14, 2012 at 12:15 am

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
(Romeo and Juliet)

Isn’t identity, in naming, fascinating? Juliet wished Romeo could just be Romeo without the family name that caused such conflict. When I protest that I am still me – same eyes, same hands, same heart – I am saying my gender title and name do not define the person, and changing them does not change me, my memories or my intentions.

But names are memories aren’t they? I remembered the name of the girl I played with at my first school, aged five. I remember her face very well too, even now, though we soon after went to separate schools afterwards. She was Jane. And remembering her brought back a host of other memories from that time, including the huge green petrol-driven scythe that cut the grass, and the smell of it, or the milk crates (and the smell of them). And I remember that friendship. Somewhere around this time I started having nightmares. Nothing specific, just frightening, and I fought them away by making up stories in my head about the two koala glove puppets my sister and I had, imagining them having a happy day. Mine was Joe, hers was Jane. I also remember the name of the girl I so wanted to sit next to and be friends with, aged 11 (girls and boys mostly sat separately until then). I remember her face very well, even though we soon after went to separate schools. She was Jayne. And this brings back a host of memories too, including the aromatic tobacco of our teacher who smoked a pipe in break times and played a concertina, and thought it a good thing to mix boys and girls in together. And then there were our neighbours through these years; we didn’t play round other people’s houses much but they were a brother and sister too, of our ages, and we often went round on a Saturday. She was Jane too, and as we grew up, I was diverted to play with her brother instead. It was strange that growing up meant growing away from girls, and then going to a boys’ school. I do remember my friends at grammar school, and have related a names story a little while back in a blog here. There were no boys called Jane – only Shirley. But I did end up partnering a girl in chemistry lessons when the school subsequently was merged with two girls’ grammar schools. I remember we were pretty good at titrations. She was called Jane.

No, I was never called Tarzan, in case you were wondering, and all these significant Janes weren’t the only girls I knew, and as it happens, I never had a girlfriend called Jane either. All I am noting is that names bring back a lot of memories, and that this is part of how trans people make decisions about what to call themselves. To lose a former life, or to keep it? To take a the name of a family member, friend or significant other? Many names have male and female equivalents, but some of us want to dissociate, others don’t want to throw anything away, some want a clean break, others to retain continuity and make life easier. Sometimes a name with particular associations is important too, and this played an important part for me. I can understand all these points of view, and it is a lovely time to assert your true identity.

(I didn’t call myself Jane.)

This week my Deed Poll forms came back, with my legal change of title and name, and so I had to start the paper chase to set many records straight. Some may take a while, and some have to follow in sequence, and some in completeness cannot yet be done. But it was remarkably simple to just phone quite a few and report the change. After going through the bank details, carefully repeating that the title was changed to ‘Ms’, I felt quite elated. Then: ‘Anything else, sir?’ she said … Oh well! Friends have said that the hardest bit to remember is she/her. What I like most on the documents is that I am no longer allowed to use the old name, and nor is anyone else. Like the piles of clothes awaiting redistribution, it will never be worn again, and like the clothes, sits there with lots of memories attached to it. But just like I never stopped wearing clothes, so I have merely put on what I prefer, and to be honest, like the clothes, I had gradually introduced Andie into my life already. It’s been in my email and online for ages, even on my bank cards, and all the time it’s been me, not some intruder or imposter.

Once again I am reminded that, as I have revisited my life story to make better sense of it, I have been there narrating a subtext all along. The conflict was there in the name, like Romeo’s, and now the rose has a corrected name. To me it’s not just as sweet, it’s sweeter.

Poems ‘Jane’, ‘How the boy got her name’, and ‘Dear Alan’ feature in the collection Realisations.

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Je ne regrette rien

  • Posted on April 9, 2012 at 8:23 pm

We all regret a lot, but today’s Guardian (UK) listed Top five regrets of the dying, and these should be our regrets before it’s too late. Why not regret them now, while we can do something about it? The five included ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’, which meant a lot to me.

So what did people expect that held me back? None of us knew, actually. It’s mostly in retrospect, as I looked at the pieces and put the jigsaw together, that I realised that I had done everything ‘right’ in the wrong way. I have been a breadwinner – and a successful one, I was a father figure – albeit a gentle one, and a good and faithful husband – albeit a feminine one inside. But I wore the clothes and presented myself in a way that I now know was uncomfortable because it made me look right to everyone else, but meant I never felt I really fitted in like that. Square pegs do fit in round holes, so long as the diagonal is the diameter. But after a while, either the corners start to wear, or the circle starts to catch. The friction got too much, and everyone else got confused, except for me, because I understood at last.

Yesterday I wasted a lot of time in great anxiety (I am a bit of a perfectionist) because my wife remarked that this blog site ‘didn’t look like that᾿ to her. Oh no! It’s been looking wrong all this time! I live on Firefox, Safari, Chrome – any browser except Internet Explorer (IE). Now Microsoft may be big, but it does sometimes live in a world of its own, and when it comes to certain standards (CSS if you know what that means) it likes to do something different. My beautiful orchids were obscured, the page ranged left, pictures pushed out of place, simply because one little instruction that means everything to everyone doesn’t to Internet Explorer. I tracked it all down, fixed it, learned something new, and now everyone can see my pages as they are supposed to look. Microsoft had been expecting me to absorb all their quirks, and I had been beautifully doing my own thing. There was no real gain, and I didn’t write anything useful all day, all that happened was that I was looking right to everyone at last.

Sometimes you think from the inside that you are doing everything right. Others see something different and think that is how you are supposed to look. Sometimes you give up: you could read my blog before on IE and ignore things being in the wrong place, or just think I wasn’t very good at web design! In the same way, you could look at me as a man before, and think I was just a bit unconventional or not good at having friends. Now I am as I should be (or on the way) people are confused. They got to live with the square peg because it fitted, or the skewed page because it could be read, or the bloke because he worked OK like that. I realise I wasn’t doing anything the way I was because I was a man, I was just being me, and if was doing things from a female perspective I thought it was normal. It was being seen and expected to be male that fitted everyone else’s expectations – except mine. And that’s why I keep saying: ‘but I’m still here! I am still just being me, just filling a bigger space differently!’ and everyone else says I am not fitting their expectations any more.

A little while ago a trans friend said to me with utter conviction: ‘I just don’t want to die a man!’

Back to the top. I have to be true to myself, because the cost of not doing so will be that regret on my dying breath, and I have a life to live that doesn’t belong to anyone else.

It kinda makes sense of my obscure Eostre poem on here. I don’t have to deny my life to date, it doesn’t have to die, and I am not ashamed of any of it. There is no dying and rising for my male life here to rescue me from evil – just a coming to life, a dawning, of my female life as a just fulfilment.

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Identity

  • Posted on April 4, 2012 at 5:49 pm

Identity is another word that is perhaps as hard to define as gender. I remember when ‘identify with’ was a new phrase that caused some difficulty with grammarians and any of us who couldn’t quite understand it because we never thought we’d ever done it.

Fascinating though, because identity isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I am who I am (isn’t that Yahweh’s response to Moses?). I think, therefore I am: Descartes. How could I be anything or anyone else?? I have found myself telling people recently that rather trite thing: ‘just be yourself; no-one else can do it as well as you can!’ But it is true – isn’t it?

After yesterday’s blog about the self(ish) half-life, I have been thinking more about identity. My desperately synthesizing brain hoovers up things I hear or see, and among today’s flotsam are a deed poll form on my desk saying who I am, my LinkedIn world where puzzlement reigns over the ex-colleague who doesn’t look quite the same but does all the same things, and my Facebook page which isn’t my face any more inviting people to transition to my other page. It’s also an unformed poem that will arrive one day that says ‘I᾿m still here’.

If you wear glasses you will know that feeling of the first time you could see again properly, and then got so used to them you found yourself looking for them when they were already on your nose! And yet everyone else said: ‘there’s something different about you …’ and couldn’t quite place it. The view from the inside was the same, but clearer. The appearance from the outside may have seemed quite strange. Fancy dress parties can give you very uncomfortable feelings too, and your sweet darling child in a grotesque hallowe’en mask can be very disturbing. Change your gender presentation, and all that you are is subsumed by what your identity does to someone else’s identity.

I have to admit this took me by surprise: that my identity, with which I had struggled for so long on the inside, but which I felt only found understanding rather than change, had actually shaped other people’s identities too. Perhaps that is my truth: was I was so good at being a man because I was shaped by all those identities around me? Like stress-balls packed tightly in a box, the memory of shape is only revealed when taken out. I came out and found my shape – but those I was packed in with most tightly then also found their true shape, and it didn’t always fit with mine any more! Had I really shaped their identity and stopped them being true to self? I say that about me, so perhaps I should not be surprised after all.

I feel different living now as I do, but I don’t feel that I am different. The ‘what’ of my presentation and declared identity is no more to me in some ways that the glasses I first put on to make me normal again. I am still here, looking out, and the ‘who’ is completely unchanged, except for the joy of restoration to a single identity instead of one that was increasingly split. The same eyes, the same hands, the same terrible jokes but the same gentle humour; the same concerns, attitudes and fears; the same loves, the same aspirations to live a good life, the same courage to do what’s right. The same needs. Nothing I ever did that felt best in life was because I was a man. The suit might have been impressive, the feelings of not belonging in male-dominated meetings was not. And yes, let’s be personal, sex for me is a pooling of resources, an equal sharing, never a male dominance, never done because of my apparent gender, never because of the body I was given.

And yet for all that, gender is such a powerful thing when identified, that other than for my own sense of identity, I have to the external world lost my identity and gained another that is completely different, and that needs to be assessed all over again for validity, for preference, for befriending or for unfriending. The deed poll says it, LinkedIn says it, Facebook says it, even my family says it. It must be true; there, my passes no longer work, and hang around my neck useless and irreplaceable. The pictures, the names, the codes of acceptance, the permissions to enter: all these externals, in the end are regarded as my identity, not the me that I am inside that has simply come home and finally belongs only to find some people have, well, just gone home too. But my door is always open, because it always has been. It’s part of my identity to be like that.

The poem in the adjacent post to this (Losing my touch) was a vision I had of returning to an old familiar place and finding it shut down and deserted behind a chain-link fence. You’ll get the gist, but I just thought as a poem it worked quite well too.

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What is a sense of gender?

  • Posted on March 28, 2012 at 5:29 pm

A section in my book Realisations is called ‘A Sense of Gender’, and it is a really curious thing. What is it to be self-aware of being a man or being a woman? Is it just a feeling of consonance with others who have bodies like yours? Or perhaps dissonance with those who don’t? That seems a bit thin somehow. I am sure that with a bit of research I could unearth psychological studies that would dip into the gendered mind, the ways we think, that place us more comfortably in one camp or the other. Except that drags us kicking into the binary conflict that simply doesn’t suit everyone.

Early in realising who I really was, I used to play this mind game: if it was a ‘Manday’ rather than a ‘Chooseday᾿ and I closed my eyes against what I was wearing, how did I feel? Hmm. Nothing really. And to begin with in my female clothes I looked as different to myself as I would to any friend. Not bad, but certainly different. Did that make me feel more like a woman and less like a man underneath? Well, it helped.

Close the eyes. Ask: what does it mean for anyone to feel like a man / woman?

There is a physical awareness, perhaps a bra wire is digging in or trousers feel tight, or maybe the lightness of a dress brushes the skin differently, and parts of your body feel the particular familiarity or unfamiliarity of something. But that doesn’t make me feel like a man or like a woman. It doesn’t make me feel gendered or placed in a role or a persona at all. I just feel like me. How do you feel?

Now put me in a party. There are the women clustered in one place, and there are the men in another. Where do I head to feel most congruent? Off to join the men and share the latest sport / cars / job news? Or to the women to find out what’s really going on, how they are feeling, what’s going on in their families? Join the first group and I don’t really know what to talk about, unless we turn to a passion like the environment, or poetry. Join the others and I am an outsider; perhaps the conversation changes because a man is present.

A man? What man? I look around and then realise it must be something about me. I have a sense of gender from the inside, everyone else has a perception that is different. My gender is visibly in the wrong kind of body. It isn’t even ambiguous enough, because I got to wear the grey trousers and the striped shirt.

There have been too many days when I have been obliged to present as a man when wanting to write about being female. What happens if someone comes up on Skype, I have the cam on, and Andie, the strongly female friend is sitting there in the wrong trousers, perhaps even unshaven, with man specs? Is that a betrayal of my sense of gender? I judge not, because I am already uncomfortable, not even looking at myself.

What do you feel when you wake up in a morning. OK, certain things can happen to a man that remind him of his gender at that time of day. But aside from that, are we aware? Does it matter? No, so long as we are content with what happens next and get on with the day, doing what we do naturally.

Kate Bornstein is producing a new edition of her Gender Workbook, and has been Tweeting regularly to gain a contemporary view of how people feel about aspects of transgender. Central is the question ‘how do you identify?’. I was not alone in a very assertive, ‘I know what I am not!’ Interesting, because I hear it more and more. I am not a man. I’m quite happy to be called transgender, but do not call me a man! It isn’t that I disown what I have lived as, and I don’t hate men. I just know I do not belong to that tribe.

Which is interesting.

For some time, mainly because it was so easy to do so, I went to the Brighton Buddhist Centre to practice meditation. Mindfulness. Being present, in the moment. Just sitting, being aware of how things are. And in that state of mind, I am aware of a physical state of being a woman. Funny that.

Over a year ago, a friend did some therapy with me in similar vein, and my first comment afterwards, reviewing the inner experience, was that throughout I had visualised myself as a woman in a white dress. I don’t know why. It wasn’t suggested, it wasn’t in the commentary. It wasn’t supposed to be there at all. The only guidance I had was to gain a sense of belonging, and to listen to myself. And there I was.

Now, having just presented myself and my intentions, in the space of a week, to well over 100 musicians, and in public as it were, I had another unexpected experience. My previous blog post covered the matter of whether it was courage or not. No, this was an awareness that somehow, enough people were just recognising what I was saying, and more than just respecting that, were welcoming me as a woman. I am perfectly aware that when I appear for the first time in that last bastion of my male life, many may find it hard to adjust. I will be a novelty, a curiosity, a not-quite-sure and what do I say to – her? But as the pronouns started to be used already, and people were writing my new name, I was so deeply at home with myself, it felt like I had been dragging an anchor and now it held.

Yes, I know what a sense of gender means – though I’m not sure I’m a whole lot better at describing it.

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Courage

  • Posted on March 25, 2012 at 11:55 am

As so often, several little things come together with a common theme, and invite reflection. This morning Jane Fae had written some comment for the Scottish Sun about her own experience of transphobic violence. Nothing new, and sadly commonplace. Last night Grrl Alex added to her blog ‘Familiarity breeds acceptance’, dealing with transphobia on trains. And yesterday, more fellow musicians told me how brave and courageous I was to come out by addressing the entire band.

All of this speaks of the motivation, the response and the inevitability or the trans life. As Jane said: ‘I’ve got used to a level of violence which, had you said to me this will happen every couple of months, I’d have been horrified.’ I can’t think that anyone would actually choose to be trans in a starkly gender binary society. But we don’t choose to be like this: it really isn’t anything to do with lifestyle. But do we have a choice at all? In a way, most of us have chosen for considerable time: to repress our true nature and live as best we can in the physically-apparent gender. Coming out trans is the result of giving up that choice. Hence what happens to us isn’t altogether avoidable if we want to live normally. So where was the courage? In the life lived-best-but-wrong, going against the current, trying daily to not feel uncomfortable, out of place as an outsider? Or in giving up and then taking whatever is cast at us? At best it is a different kind of courage.

Grrl Alex reflected on dealing with society’s curiosity, not just deliberate transphobia. We can forgive ignorance, but we can give understanding. A trans person on a train is cornered, and it does take courage to travel in a way that leaves you tremendously vulnerable and trapped. Alex’s book relates her own early experiences with trains, and I have had the feeling of surprise in going for a quiet late train, and arriving to find it was football night and packed with striped scarves. Again, no choice. But Alex raises the question of vulnerability and courage. If you act very ‘just leave me alone!’ you can become a target, whereas if you address the ignorant attacker honestly, confident in who you are, you can realise that the problem was really transphobiaphobia (coined perhaps by Richard Beard in Becoming Drusilla, which I recommend). So clearly an active courage can be a great help – so long as you want to be out and visible, and not pretend to be stealth (ie, so convincingly gender binaried that you are indistiguishable from cis-gendered people) when you are not. Alex resolves this by being herself (and I always hesitate at pronouns for Alex) and rather than being brave, is assertive (the blog and cover of the Grrl Alex book speak for themselves).

Which brings us to me. I chose on several occasions this past week, to stand up in front of between 30 and 40 people at a time who have long known me as a man, and effectively say ‘I am a woman’ – with a bit of explanation. For ages I scrubbed off nail varnish, changed my watch, as well as everything else, after a day lived as a woman, just to go and play the trumpet. And I admit there was no courage there. I tired of that, and soon people were noticing – even admiring – my choice of colours, which maybe matched a bracelet also left on. I relaxed. That wasn’t courage, it was just starting to be myself. And anyone who asked, increasingly got a direct reply that I was transgender. Was that courage? No, it was just getting safer to be honest. Compared with the first time I went out as a woman, speaking in public about myself as a woman was almost trivial. So I protest now that I am only doing what I have to do and that, being authentic, it is just being honest. I don’t have a choice, when the alternative is a denial of self.

So why am I so visible? Is it just that I can never be pretty enough to ‘go stealth’? Maybe age is on my side after all! No. I have shared with people around the world what it is like to be trans, and have found so many scared people, in very unforgiving circumstances, or in fear of what they might have to admit to themselves and to partners that, like Grrl Alex, I feel compelled, at least for now, to say ‘It’s OK to be trans. You don’t have to be a 100 per cent man or woman, indistinguishable from cis-gendered folk. This is part of normality and the way the world is.’

So if I show any courage at all, it is because I want to give a little more confidence to people who need it in order to realise themselves. I can’t make life easier for them or for me. This is tough. This can tear your emotions apart like nothing else. But it is OK, whoever in your life can’t cope with it. And it is far, far better than trying to pretend everything is fine in gender-land when it is not.

Courage is what you have when you enter a place, not where safety is not guaranteed, but where you are positively likely to get threatened. These are places we simply must eradicate, but they won’t go until trans people do stand up and be visible, be assertive, write in our newspapers, blog and live normal lives – like people of different races, or gay and lesbian and anything else between increasingly can.

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