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Rebranding

  • Posted on March 21, 2012 at 9:23 am

I play trumpet in several bands, and one of them has been thinking about its logo – its brand identity – for quite some time. As a contemporary wind band, the old logo of an ancient harp and classical laurels aren’t exactly what we are about, and in the last couple of years we really have become probably the best of our kind in the region, so we should look the part. Quite what it is that makes us unable to design, or have designed for us, a logo, I’m not sure. Maybe there is a fear that someone might ‘win’ and someone else might feel rejected – or just that not everyone will like what we end up with and someone will be blamed. I designed and run the website, and I do the publicity artwork, so I’m frustrated that I can’t update it with an image that portrays us better. I feel I’m bursting at the seams for want of a resolution.

Yes, that is all true, but it is also an analogy. Now a little story.

Yesterday [my friend a trombone player] met a woman in a doctor’s waiting room. He had never met her before, but she recognised him, and when she came out, they sat and had a chat for five minutes until he went in. Of course, he had recognised her name when called, but it was a name that will not be called again at that practice. Strangely, it was the least embarrassing meeting she had ever had in a doctor’s waiting room.

Today, that same woman came to another practice, to rehearse for the next concert with her friend on the trombone, and her friends on trumpet, flute and clarinet. But before doing so, she erased her identity, kicked off her heels and dressed as a man. Everyone recognised her.

But she is weary of waiting rooms. Tired of the rebranding that never seems to arrive. Sad that she is only recognised when rubbed out.

I am that woman. And the observant will have noticed that it is my new name and my new email on all my websites. They will have noticed that I won a poetry prize with the wrong name. If they Googled that name they would have found me for poetry, for book reviews, for being a publisher, and for this blog. The observant will have noticed pierced ears, painted nails, plucked eyebrows. And readers of a previous blog post will know the pain that the erasures cause.

Last night, with another band, I had a lovely exchange with a bassoon player, in which we described our ‘differences’ which are entirely normal to us. I guess admitting to being transgender does open some doors, even if it closes others. I could have given her such a big hug! But her reply was two-fold: first, why did I dress as a man if this is how I am? The second was that I had great courage. The first made sense, hence this story. The second I always reject. This is not courage, this is just being authentic. If we can’t be true to ourselves, we are not living the one life we have been given, as it should be lived: as only we can. This is not bravery any more, this is just giving in.

I identify as transgender, and I have been living as a woman increasingly for over a year, dealing with a lifetime’s discomforts and 40 years of not being able to understand why, or what I could do about it. I am at peace with myself, while I know the profound consequences it is having on my nearest and dearest. But it is all the friends who have been so supportive and reassuring, that have given me a sense of trust and a freedom to present my true self in hope of acceptance.

This is not Tootsie or Mrs Doubtfire. If you want a name to look up, it’s gender dysphoria: it’s a question of gender identity, not of sexual orientation. It is not a psychological disorder and it is not a product of nurture. Something in how I was born means that for all the body I have, my sense of who I am does not quite match. We are all happy to talk of women with strong masculine identities, how they wear the trousers, or succeed in a man’s world. And we are all happy to talk of men who clearly have a strong feminine side. What we never think about is what percent of opposite-genderedness we are comfortable with? Ten per cent? What about 50 per cent? What about a man with a 75 per cent feminine side? What about the 90 per centers, who for all their physiology, cry out that this is not what they are on the inside, in their soul?

As I begin to present at band practices as a woman, I expect to be spoken of as ‘she’ and ‘her’. But the last thing I want is to be a distraction: I am only there to play music after all! I understand that I shall be a curiosity for a while, but one thing is incredibly important to me: if anyone has a question, I want them to talk to me, not to discuss me as some kind of oddity or make me a subject of speculation. They can ask me anything that I can ask them in return. Deal? I hope so, because if the estimated 1 in 4,000 of us is touched by similar gender identity issues, I am actually a lot more normal than any of them might suppose. In fact I may well not be the only transgender person they know: it’s just that I choose to be visible.

Tonight the band has an AGM. That usually means a poor turnout! But tonight I shall read this out, and those who aren’t there can come here instead and read it. I don’t think we shall resolve the band identity tonight, but I do hope that I can now stop erasing my own.

And finally, a big thank you to all those who already know, and who have been so supportive and encouraging. It means a great deal to me.

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Standing on the edge of time (coming out, again)

  • Posted on March 18, 2012 at 10:04 am

Musicians are quite promiscuous. No, not like that: I mean that once you find a band or orchestra to play in, you find more than one, and most of us play in several. In my region I would be surprised to be invited to deputise (fill in for a shortage on a section) anywhere without meeting regular players that I’ve played with elsewhere. It’s actually rather nice never to be a stranger. But it does make this a very widely connected and disparate social circle, compared with other friend groups I have that are much more compact.

This connection can make life potentially very confusing if you’re contemplating coming out as transgender, and you know that it will take some time before everyone appreciates what it means, how to talk about it, and the curiosity and gossip die down. Meantime it can be very uncomfortable. Do you come out one band at a time? Or all at once and try to catch the debris as best you can? What if you’ve told one group but not another, with all that promiscuous cross-mixing? Is one band now expecting you to turn up as a woman, while another cannot, yet has players who know? Can you be one thing one week and another the next?

The edge of time

It is at points of transition like this where discomfort can be more acute. I have had wonderful support from a number of people – in fact everyone I’ve told and spoken to individually. But, I do have this sense that social circles like bands are rather more strictly gendered than others. Maybe my idea of brass bands in particular is rooted in my Yorkshire beginnings, where female players play up to the men and everyone wears the same braided jacket, and everyone drinks beer. Maybe I just know that it’s the power of male presence in what used to be smoky night club venues and late dance bands. Maybe I just have a feeling that the men are real men and the girls enter their world.

Nowhere else has the issue of changing rooms (‘men are on the left, girls on the right, and er, well, if you’re neither of those …’ *haw-haw*!) and gender jokes felt so painful. Maybe it’s just nights out, where girls like to be spotted and flirted with, and the blokes away from home for a night love doing it. Partners get fed up coming out to hear the same old music, if they come at all, and the cameraderie of music can seem like an opportunity …

So who and what you are as a musician matters quite a lot. You are afraid of becoming the oft-repeated joke, carried away across that immense interconnected network of musicians everywhere. There’s no messing about here – if you’re coming out, you have to be committed.

And that is the edge of time for me. The bloke who used to play the trumpet isn’t there anymore. But is she a real woman? Or just the odd one out? Leaving an old life behind can mean a new one just isn’t as easy to establish as you’d like. Of all places I have come out as transgender, this is the steepest precipice, the biggest audience, the greatest risk. Will I ever be welcome in the women’s changing room? Will gendered jokes be more circumspect? Or will I be neither one of the girls nor one of the blokes, just nothing, in the middle – the laugh that echoes in the corridor between closed changing room doors?

Standing on the edge

By the time you read this I may be well over the edge, but as I write, it is one of the most significant phases in realising my transgenderedness. It has been a preservative for my family of the old normality. (At least he’s still a man when he goes to band!) Not so long ago I was sitting in rehearsal, counting bars, trumpet on my knee, thinking how strange my own clothes seemed. Very much the wrong trousers. For ages I have fallen to pieces inside before concerts, because I had to wear the DJ and bowtie while all the women made themselves lovely in long black skirts or concert dresses, and looked beautiful. And last night I felt very close to the edge, as gender shouted itself at me for an hour leading up to being on stage.

So once again I am contemplating how best to present myself authentically, without becoming a distraction, just so I can play music as best I can among fellow musicians who respect me. I have no idea who will, and who will (or can) not. It’s an edge, and I might fall off. And when I step off this time, something will go forever: a relief to me, but an awkward enigma for many.

I worry about hot summer venues and the things I must wear to stop being mistaken for a man. I worry about Royal Marines sitting either side of me and not knowing what to say to me. I worry about gendered evenings when I simply don’t fit ‘the arrangements’.

Time

I have nowhere else to go, and no-one else to be but myself, and this time again, I have no real choice at all. A couple of days ago, talking together with a counselor, my wife struggling with pronouns, I realised that the ‘he’ we were talking about used to be me.

Funny thing is, it doesn’t make my trumpet playing any better or worse …

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Keeping up appearances

  • Posted on March 15, 2012 at 4:26 pm

Today I bought a Daily Mail for the first time in ages. It was because there was a story of how Jane Fae and her daughter Tash came to terms with Dad being transgender. I wish the trauma in our house had been so easily resolved – but envy will get me nowhere.

On the way, I called in at a print shop where I’d been and got a good deal the day before. And the bank to drop some cheques in. Well that was easy: at the bank was the branch manager with whom I’d arranged a business account a couple of months earlier, so she knew the woman presenting the cheques, recognised me, and remembered probably her first openly transgendered client. Yesterday might have been different.

I slid along to the print shop next door, and my first explanation was ‘Sorry: I was dressed as a man yesterday: I know, it can be confusing’, but she was so totally OK about it, I didn’t need to say. Maybe I was hoping she wouldn’t recognise me! But then I wanted her to remember the deal we’d made. We had a lovely chat instead.

That was all after yet another visit from a heating engineer to fix our central heating. Very prompt service, but he met the woman of the house this morning, because yesterday I was expecting to have to crawl around the loft and a sludgy header tank, so I dressed (or didn’t) to do that. The pink blouse and denim skirt didn’t faze him one bit. ’Nah, don’t worry about that, doesn’t bother me!’ He sees all sorts probably, and I didn’t look like I was going to proposition him! We talked about the technical details of heating systems, tuning old cars etc. instead. He was so pleased to talk to someone who actually understood!

What he found today was that the last man in had wrongly diagnosed a faulty pump and replaced it – upside down. I had before and after photos and an invitation form for CheckaTrade. In a couple of hours, the first man was back, humbly giving the pink lady a cheque for £190 reimbursement!

I brought the Daily Mail back home to ‘leave around’, in case it helps break the deadlock. Jane Fae had an interesting blog this morning too, comparing those young trans people we know and love who are sooo young and girly, we just feel a poor second; middle-aged women who, because they look like middle-aged women, look a bit more like middle-aged men than girly-girls. Actually I think Jane looks very creditable. But the comments about her under the Daily Mail online were as awful as ever. People who, in the anonymity of the Internet, find it necessary to be very personal, very derogatory and rude, and feed off each other in showing how utterly ‘normal’ they are. (They don’t do this anywhere else. You won’t catch any of them walking up to a less-than-attractive woman in the high street, just to tell them they look ugly, or to someone with a disfigurement to tell them their plastic surgery has been a waste of NHS money that should have been spent on them instead.)

Well, today I felt more normal than that. I am, after all, just being myself, and keeping up appearances.

It’s just that I have a beautiful grown-up very girly-girl daughter who can’t see me. Here’s another poem from the forthcoming Realisations volume:

 

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Trans parent

  • Posted on March 15, 2012 at 4:23 pm

There is nothing so opaque as being
a trans parent. And yet, in familiarity,
they see right through you. Able only to see

in a distance who you were, without
resting on your heart. It’s hard
to understand whether a father left off

caring, understanding or being strong
when somewhere, inside this not-mother
a voice speaks, vulnerable as they.

I shall never pass here, only be different –
as if swallowed, digested, absorbed
by someone uninvited to their home.

I have become thin – a veil on their whole
lifetime, from first blue-eyed recognition
to this struggle with a strangeness.

So thin, so hard to focus on, that I am
deep as an ocean, clear as water, a sea
through which a seahorse passes unseen.

2012 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Of friends and vulnerability

  • Posted on February 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm

I don’t believe anyone trans comes out with complete confidence, ready-made, knowing all the best replies, happy to learn what you got wrong when someone ‘reads’ you and is rude (‘Hey! Thanks! That’s really useful! I’ll remember that next time.’), and shrugging off all the uncertainties of living in a new space. But it is one thing to learn to walk in heels, lift your voice naturally and believe in it, and quite another not to walk among strangers in the street, but face your best friend and tell them the news.

I have been extraordinarily comforted by friends who have asked about the nail polish, or the lengthening hair, and have listened to the short version of my story, and not just embraced something quite novel to their experience, but congratulated me on my honesty and courage, and wished me well. I have no problem talking to anyone who wants to know, even if in the end neither of us would say we quite understand! And so far, touch wood, no-one outside my family has criticised, doubted or scorned. OK, I don’t know what they say when I’ve gone, but on the whole the gossip grape-vine has remained quiet. Is it just that all along I’ve been a jolly nice person, a helpful go-out-of-my way sort of person? That I get involved, that I care? Maybe. And now I hope I just go on being all that, rather than getting angry, hurt, distrustful and self-protecting about being different.

Instead, I am in some ways being deliberately vulnerable. I don’t want to get locked inside a thick skin that changes my shape just so I don’t get hurt. I shall get hurt, of that I have no doubt, and some will call me naïve. But there’s a bit of me that says if I get seen to stand up for myself without getting bitter, it might help someone else do the same. If trans people are seen to be damaged, hurt and grouchy, they will never just be normal to everyone else. I’m OK with being trans. Even though it might cost pretty much everything I hold dear.

But telling your best friend? Ah.

Telling your wife and family is sort of inevitable, and kind as you are, however helpful in explaining, sharing books, talking it through, you know you have changed something pretty fundamental. (Have I broken a contract? For richer, for poorer … for maler or femaler?) Whatever I want, they have choices too, and they might break my heart. And there is nothing much I can do about that, because they have to know, in every detail, and forecast where I might be going before I even know myself.

Best friends are different. How much I say and when is up to me. We all say that friends who walk away are not really friends at all, but we know the ones we really don’t want to lose – because friends are our support network, the place we go when even things at home aren’t so hot. Independent advice, outside perspective and all that. And some friends are good for one thing, some for another. Best friends are those we expose our vulnerabilities to – and coming out as transgender is an extremely vulnerable time. If I tell a particular friend, it could make me feel a lot worse, a lot less supported, and lose me a key point in my network of a friend who can explain and support me to other friends.

I got to a point where a number of friends knew, among a lot of others who share my social space that did not. And the worst thing would be for a best friend, a close friend, to find out in the wrong way and feel I hadn’t trusted them. I did – but that didn’t stop me feeling scared to lose them or make them more distant. After all, I do appreciate that a lot of us, when challenged about being associated with something unusual, can suddenly lose commitment to avoid criticism. And being transgender is still like infecting or contaminating other people’s lives.

So for a long time I knew I had to bite the bullet with a particular friend: possibly change a friendship forever, with a history of deep sharing in difficult times over a number of years. And I did lose sleep over it, and I did put it off, and several times I nearly said what I had to say, only to duck at the last moment. I couldn’t ask for an urgent meeting because that would set a scare agenda; I just had to decide to make it the next available slot together.

Here’s some useful advice if you’re in the same place: tell a few other people that this is what you intend to do. Tell them your fears, and cut your escape route, knowing that at least there might be a bit of sympathy if it all goes wrong, because they are going to ask you how it went.

I told my best friend over coffee a few days ago. I said she hadn’t said anything about my nails, hair, bracelets, rings … the day she turned up in my garden, and my trousers and t-shirt weren’t quite male enough, and my toes were pink. ‘Oh!’ she said ‘I didn’t think I needed to say anything. I thought you were just expressing your feminine side. I’ve always known that was strong in you.’

For her, I am just the same person, illuminated a bit more starkly perhaps, but my happiness is part of the friendship, and now I know I have another pillar in my life for when things don’t go quite so well. The transgender experience is one of vulnerability, and sometime you can feel like the butterfly at the end of summer, but it’s the colours that keep you going, hopping flowers on the breeze instead of chewing leaves. And my friend has made some things suddenly seem a lot easier. I thank her from the bottom of my heart.

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