You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'experience'.

Lessons from a journey

  • Posted on December 7, 2014 at 12:33 pm

As ever, my week gathers things in the plug hole as it drains away ready for another. Friends who are getting their Gender Recognition Certificates with some awe, others getting dates for appointments or surgery with relief. A youngster riding mountainous waves of gender dysphoria, facing a long journey and the knowledge that some things will never be completely right.

Four Christmases ago I learned for the first time that I was not alone, and now everywhere I look there are people learning they are not alone, but together. It isn’t any easier for all that, because the real journeys are not to and from gender clinics, psychiatrists, facing misunderstanding, rejection, or even love that tries but cannot understand. The real journeys are within ourselves, undoing teachings, received wisdom, self-perceptions, recognising colours in a world given to us as black and white.

Waypoint 1

No-one can do this for you, your journey is uniquely yours

There is is no carrying, no little scooter, no comfortable paladin, no shoulders to ride on. This journey is entirely under your own steam. Get used to it, because this is how life actually is. As a sheep in a dense flock, you can rest your feet and be carried along, chased by a dog to the same field or pen as last time. On this trip you may find help, support, even love. But you are, in the end, on your own. You began at your conception, you were born uniquely you, your mind is only yours, and your self-understanding entirely within yourself. You will die. Between now and then you can only live your own life, and discriminate between how much advice you receive is sensible and appropriate, and how much isn’t, and when there isn’t any, choose what to do by yourself. That simply means accepting complete responsibility for the way your life goes. Did I say simply? Most of us don’t do this terribly well. It is the greatest lesson you can learn, treasure it.

Waypoint 2

You cannot set the conditions

Much as you would like to customise this journey on your own terms, you cannot. This is not a journey through jungle with a machete, this is a journey where you weave your way through and may leave no path behind. Sometimes bent stems will help others see where you’ve been, and parts may become beaten tracks, but there are parts of your journey that are almost secret, because they are yours alone. You cannot ask for a journey of a particular kind, or a scenic route, or avoiding things you don’t like, and you can’t choose what you can take with you. Most trans people will be very firm that this journey itself is not a choice, it is a given, an imperative. Tough, that you can’t choose from a series of options like a package tour. Get used to the excitement.

Waypoint 3

You cannot choose the length of your journey

When you start a journey of transition, you might want it to be a manageable length, but the fingerboard saying ‘this way’ says just that. No miles or kilometres or years, just ‘this way’. If you want to see the end you must commit. Just that. You can turn back, or start again, whatever and whenever you choose, but only go forward with commitment and trust. If you do turn around, there isn’t a gate right behind you, only jungle, but you can get back where you started, more or less, if that’s what you decide. This is your journey, however many people are doing something similar, and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Ask only: ‘What if I don’t?’ and get your boots on. Life is an extreme sport, if you really want to live it.

Waypoint 4

This journey is not really about getting somewhere, it’s about finding yourself

In a way we are seeking approval too much. Approval by psychiatrists, a diagnosis, clinical support, family, friends, society. The truth is, we are finding ways to be more acceptable, to speak, walk, talk, dress, gesture, even think, in ways that others will find easier. We work hard for them. But it is equally true, that what emerges is a deeper understanding of what we naturally are. Some trans women start off by going ultra-feminine as a counterbalance, and then gradually settle into jeans and sneakers, going largely without make-up – like most other women. And even being confident about the male aspects of their identities (we are all of us a balance of both). Our femininity is found inside, not in what we present to others through externals. The feminine comes out naturally in the end, released rather than imposed. We may think that clinical remedy in hormones and/or surgery is our destination, but it isn’t. It is important, even vital to our inner sense of authenticity, but it isn’t what gives us our gender. Gender is what we find when freed to live it. By making this journey your own, by understanding that, you can be freed into your authenticity. When you don’t need acceptance any more you will find it, because you found yourself behind what others told you you were, and then found people who like it.

Waypoint 5

The map we have been given was wrong

In Hereford Cathedral (UK) hangs Mappa Mundi, a unique 13th century map of the known world. It is really curious to us, and has very quaint ideas of the relative sizes and distances, with whole parts missing and some made up to fill the gaps: the draughtsperson (or committee!) must have thought ‘It must be like this’. Brilliant for its day, and ambitious, but it is not properly representative, and wholly inadequate for finding your way around the real world. We have social maps representing the way things are too, and some are way out of date, however many people are still using them. There are no automatic updates like with in-car sat-navs, and we who journey struggle with people who say the jungle is not just impenetrable, but should not be penetrated. Perhaps ‘there be dragons’. Within moments, minutes, or hours of our birth, we are given tags that place us on a social map. We are designated an outer identity and told that this is our inner identity because the two must be the same. This social Mappa Mundi has a part on gender that was filled in with inadequate understanding, and this waypoint is a big one. It takes a foundation away from you, and from almost everyone you know. But it is the map, not you, that held a wrong interpretation.

Waypoint 6

You will never see your world the same way again

Say goodbye to your ideas about the world. Whether it is your spiritual development and direction, your emotional response to things, your psychological understanding, your social interactions, your prejudices, beliefs, and even your abilities. Everything must become mobile. Those of you with smart phones, tablets and touch screens of all kinds, may be familiar with the method: if you want to move an icon, hold your finger on it until it wobbles, then drag it to where it belongs, reordering your tools to better represent your life. Unlike the smart phone technology, you will actually see life differently. Some wobbly things will disappear altogether, others will be things you never thought before. You will see other people completely differently, some with more colours, some with rather less than before. Ideas of acceptability, normality, creativity and stuckness will be transformed. You will be like an astronaut seeing the world from outside for the first time, its preciousness and its vulnerabilities, its size and its wholeness, its context and its loneliness. You will compare it with your own Mappa Mundi and begin to understand.

And if you grasp these waypoints, and doubtless many more, you will be filled with gratitude for a life of learning, however tough the jungle, and however much people call you back. And above all, you will find yourself. It may be very different from when you started.

Continue reading Lessons from a journey »

Care to leave a comment? »

Futures aren’t found in harbours

  • Posted on November 29, 2014 at 11:24 pm

For a number of weeks I have been going along to a weekly evening workshop entitled ‘Future You’. My motivation is the need to do more than put up with where I am. Its focus isn’t entirely employment-oriented, so whilst that’s what I wanted it for initially, I can use its techniques for other things. I speak of two last pieces in my jigsaw: employment where I can maximise my gifts and abilities, and finding someone I can share my life with (as open-ended as that). The rest of my picture feels complete, or at least malleable and growing.

This next year needs to be a year of change, and I feel that I have at least found my starting blocks with what I have achieved this past year. Underlying my missing jigsaw pieces (or the piece that is missing and the piece that doesn’t fit) is the idea in common of giving as much of myself as I can to connect with my world in an authentic way. If you happen to be reading this and know where I am, work, or who I know, yes, I am saying I need change, not that I am unhappy with the way that I work, or the way that I relate to others.

The Future You series is about happiness, in this sense: of meeting my values, understanding my needs, finding my dreams and living as completely as possible. As things are, my happiness quotient surges and falls to an unknown tidal pull. This week I have risen on emotionally moving moments and completely collapsed on griefs and uncertainties. My ship feels unanchorable sometimes. Was the moon in the wrong phase, or the planets out of alignment? Or is it just Christmas bringing home the isolation I feel at this time? To find myself in silent tears at the end of the day, and waking with them, isn’t something I expected. I feel a new horizon is coming into sight on winds of change. It isn’t just a cliché, I really am hoping for a fresh wind out of this year’s safe harbour.

What stops me just doing something brilliant, is simply that I have no idea what this future me is. In fact, logically speaking, my future me is always some way ahead of now. My future me is what I shall become, but setting my sails with some intention requires a little more than happy accident, and I do have fears. I am afraid of speaking out: ah, so I’m no longer committed to my employer? No; it’s just that I am not discovering myself or doing all that I could do in my working hours. 300 miles a week, 11 hours in a car, needs a good reason, and a better one than just to pay my mortgage. It’s the same with relationships. My heart really aches for affection and to be loved, but to say this is tantamount to being desperate – and we all know that you don’t find love by saying you’re looking for it. Just be happy, even though you aren’t happy not to be loved and have someone to love. Just be happy in your job, in case opportunities may be withdrawn because you’re not happy.

By going to this series of workshops, I am quietly making resolutions. I don’t think I shall have a Christmas this year, but my gift to myself can be generosity to my own needs, in starting to work out what practical things I need to do. I won’t be making new year’s resolutions either; by then I shall have resolved that I have a future that will be different.

There is nothing about this future me that is not of my own making, any more than that was true this past year. 2014 was not done to me. I did 2014! Some decisions will simply have to be made, and more ties may need to be severed that I have hung onto for too long. I have to be happy to be sailing, not happy to be where I am.

I have used the ship analogy along my journey through transition, including crossing the turbulent reef, losing crew, and arriving in calm waters with tattered sails and a broken mast. Since then I have new friends and feel thoroughly repaired and seaworthy again. Maybe the lesson I have needed to remind myself of, is that the first step to change and to being in the right place is to pull up your anchor.

Goodness, I should know!

Continue reading Futures aren’t found in harbours »

Care to leave a comment? »

Connectedness

  • Posted on November 9, 2014 at 11:38 am
incremental counter

It’s my birthday. The one I got awarded a new certificate for – but I wonder whether to celebrate the July one next year anyway as a second birthday. It isn’t important really, just a year comes round again, notches up the counter and it flips into a new number. The feeling made more sense in a pre-digital age, with little wheels turning on a car dashboard, or a tape recorder. They started to twitch and turn just before, clicked decisively into place and looked really settled for a long time. Age notching doesn’t just happen, it takes weeks. Do…

Continue reading Connectedness »

Care to leave a comment? »

Dressing up, dressing down

  • Posted on November 1, 2014 at 12:56 pm

Last night was Halloween: all hallows (saints) eve, originally for remembering the saintly dead. It has gone from a remembering or an honouring, to a commercial amalgam of all kinds of festival elements and large-scale imports of US activities, that currently is dishonouring of the dead and, increasingly, dishonouring of the living. The misuse of cultural identities in fancy dress has now extended to parody of disability and mental illness.

I would rather go with Samhain as it was (elements came into Halloween in order to Christianise it, including moving the date of All Saints Day). It is still useful to recognise that the old dies so that the new can come, revitalised. And even that the dead stays away. We may not doubt it, and ensure it with ritual, but being actively reminded of the cyclical nature of things in my opinion is good. This year in the UK the autumn season is blurring summer long past its expected end; the year is refusing to die in some ways. Shopping in shirtsleeves in November doesn’t seem quite right, and bees and butterflies are still around. The interwoven cycles that depend on the seasons and their timing will be distorted, and some dependencies of one species on another will break down as expected food sources aren’t there later.

A few weeks ago it did get chilly, and I swapped around my wardrobe and seasonal suitcase, pulling out the warmer clothes. There’s something of old friends about this: clothes you haven’t seen for a good six months. But outside my window, just as I feel uncertain about what to wear, the trees are still very green, some only just starting to turn yellow. They are just going with the flow: if the sunshine and rain are both there, it’s leaf time. Dressing down for winter will come, and I will dress up.

What is it with dressing up, though

I have rarely been to fancy dress parties, including Halloween. Quite apart from the gore and horror, I actually don’t like doing it! Ironic, surely? One of the big not-so-secret things about Halloween in the USA, is the occasion it has long provided for people to wear clothes of the ‘opposite’ gender. For some it may be opposite, but for people with unanswered gender identity questions, or who are closeted transgender, it is a chance to be hidden in plain sight, especially if they do it rather well. A friend showed me a photograph of his great grandfather, and friend who is dressed as a woman in a European national costume. The friend looks so completely natural that we have our doubts as to whether this is indeed just fancy dress. I included a poem Found Images in my first collection Realisations, on this theme some time ago.

And then so many trans* people can remember their earliest days of shucking around in their mother’s high heels, wearing girls’ things from the dressing up box. I did, a bit. And yet for some reason I always found dressing up (when other people were around) hugely embarrassing. Even the thought of it made me feel awkward. My wife might speak about dressing up as meaning dolled up, glad rags and all that. Of course, if you aren’t about to get your best dress out, there isn’t a lot you can do. Suit? Loud tie? Least-worn shirt that isn’t just a stripe? The jumper you would never wear for work?

The first time you fully dress to go out (or even share time with someone else) in clothes not of your assigned/presumed gender you can feel a mess of mixed feelings. Are you doing it inconspicuously; are you prepared to be noticed; are you comfortable? Because for sure you are making a statement and opening yourself up to anything from surprise to ridicule. If dressing up is already a hugely embarrassing thing anyway, allowing yourself to feel natural can be very hard. But what are you doing?

I can’t remember how many times I trotted out: ‘They aren’t women’s clothes, they’re my clothes!’ I was not dressing up at all, I was just wearing what felt right. My very first description to my wife, the day she returned after a weekend away, during which I had bought and worn women’s (outer) clothes for the first time, was simply: ‘it just felt perfect’. Fateful words.

Over the following two years, I felt too painfully close to the world of cross-dressing (transvestism), which I came to see clearly was not the right description for me. It was a curiosity for me that some would go to events dressed in male clothes, where ‘dressing facilities’ were available. They would socialise in clothes of their preference, then change and return home. Being dressed ‘as a woman’ was not dressing up (maybe sounding too child-like) but simply ‘dressing’. For me, that all seemed very sad, and I could never be comfortable with ‘dressing’ any more than I could with ‘dressing up’. Surely, all my clothes were simply my clothes.

What is it with dressing down?

More verbal ambiguity in English! Dress-down Friday is a workplace idiom (again from the US and Canada) meaning to go to work casual, instead of in business attire. It’s a relaxation to make people feel more comfortable and less formal. A dressing-down, on the other hand, is a reprimand of military origin, where insignia of rank are stripped off as punishment and demotion.

Being myself was never a matter of dressing up, fancy dress, or feminising. It was just a matter of getting used to clothes with more variety, more shape and style, more colour and pattern, and that felt right. But I wrote here long ago about how female to male transition increases the honours, whereas male to female transition is a removal of status, privilege and rank. So if anything my ‘dressing up’ was ‘dressing down’, even though it increased my own comfort enormously. My style at work was not executive (a woman dressing ‘up’ to look as important as a man) nor dressing down (jeans and tees), because I had no inclination to look like a man in either direction. I wanted actively to look different to how I was before, and so for three years I almost never wore trousers or jeans. And to be honest, female-cut jeans can be awkward!

Dressed up? Dressed down? Oh, the Grand Old Duke of York … and when he was only halfway … he was neither.

There are huge quandaries for people in transitioning. Your sense of identity is changing on the inside, and may not settle for some time. You may be gender queer, or androgynous – or anything. Are clothes too certain a statement, or not certain enough? Don’t go buying an expensive dress if you soon decide you are trans-butch! But people do worry about presenting at a gender identity clinic saying they are female, but dressed in jeans and jumper. Are you really full-time? Full-time what?

The bottom line is that for other people seeing you around, your clothes signify something, like feathers on a bird: brown=female, colourful=male (yes, birds are largely the other way round!). This should not mean, however, that you have to dress to impress. ‘Today I am dressed as a woman dressed as a man!’ should be OK, and in fact you might feel perfectly female in a suit, or in jeans and tee. But it seems that even ordinary clothes are a form of dressing up to communicate. I’m in this party.

Finding a balance

This morning there will be people around here who are exhilarated by cross-dressing on Halloween. This morning there will be wives, partners and friends breathing a sigh of relief that the clothes have gone away, and that the clear pleasure shown last night need not be seen again for some time. Grayson Perry is OK because Grayson/Claire is a flamboyant artist. Drag is OK because it’s mainly part of flamboyant gay culture. It’s dressing up. But please, please don’t tell me that what you did last night was not really dressing up at all.

Clothes define no-one, and they don’t classify anyone. They don’t give you an identity and they don’t change you. You change them. Some of us need to work with clothes freely, in order to find what really fits. Not to add insignia or status, but to dress down to what is really comfortable. This changes, and sometimes we need to be assertive (all the times I was the only woman in the room wearing a skirt) and sometimes we need to be clear. But it is for no-one else to use your clothes to define or categorise you either. Maybe you need to be smart and presentable for work, maybe you want to do fancy dress (but please think about why you are choosing what may be a parody of someone else’s life), maybe you want to be safe and practical. Be prepared to change as well, and to allow clothes to express you, not define you, because who and what you are is your business.

I objected a year ago to wearing a sexist brass band uniform, stood by my principles, and left. At the time, a compromise would have damaged my sense of identity. The first thing I did after surgery? I bought trousers; and now I wear trousers and jeans quite a lot. They fit, not just physically, but mentally too, and I am never mistaken for wearing them.

Dressing up? Dressing down? I just get up in the morning and get dressed. And I do have a posh frock or two, ready for those still-hoped-for special occasions with someone special. Ah well!

Continue reading Dressing up, dressing down »

Care to leave a comment? »

Writes, rights, rites

  • Posted on October 13, 2014 at 9:49 pm

Yesterday I got round to a browser tab I’d been saving for a week or so. It felt like it needed time, and I’m glad. It was a survey by Loughborough University on the revised ICD-11 diagnostic criteria, very thorough and thought-provoking, and took two hours. It was all about the terms and words used to treat gender dysphoria (in current nomenclature), and whether ‘gender incongruence’ is better or worse. And about whether a clinical diagnosis is relevant, necessary, and if it should be classed as psychological. All this, divided by under-12 children, adolescents 12-15, and adults.

Writes

I had by this time also expressed another niggle on Facebook about gender recognition (the Act, Panel, and Certificate), because last Friday the Gender Recognition Panel met with my papers in hand, to decide whether I met the criteria of being a woman. I shall know in the next few weeks. I’ve written previously about the indignity of this, not least because my gender is of no consequence to anyone else but me, let alone a subject to be policed by people with no experience of gender dissonance, dysphoria or incongruence. And at my expense. I have also signed up for another survey, on my experience of the impact of the Gender Recognition Act. It has all been on my mind recently, since the Act contains unfairness, injustice, verbosity and bureaucracy.

It also came at a time that a news story has been circulating in print and on UK morning TV, about someone detransitioning. The media coverage has been bad, in terms of sensationalism, gross inaccuracy, misleading information, and undermining the 99 per cent successful outcomes of gender treatment. Here, a man (who still says on TV ‘I am a woman’) says it has been too difficult (after 10 years) to live as a woman. Their treatment has been testosterone-blockers and oestrogen, coupled with breast augmentation (reported – I guess wildly exaggerated – as FF). Their treatment was described as costing £10,000 (‘of taxpayers’ money’), which is the standard figure quoted for genital reconstruction surgery, despite this surgery never having taken place. Media preference for inventing a good story aside, this person had a choice, and still does. There is nothing disgraceful or sensational about that. This, to me is just a marker of being gender queer, not gender dysphoric in the more common binary sense. It’s a bit like a prominent lesbian writer who has recently said that she chose to be lesbian. That to me is a clear marker of being bisexual. Where there is choice, even where there is preference, there are people who fall outside the binary view. Surprise, surprise! The binary is an invention of a simplistic world that does not encompass the breadth of human experience.

The point, however, is that all this writing (yes, like this blog) is but one viewpoint, given an appearance of authority by the media. The detransitioner urged massively more psychological screening at gender clinics, which might drive more to suicide than it would save. Let’s hear more from those whose lives are saved than the tiny minority who feel the need to blame someone else for their decision.

Rights

And so, on several fronts, there is this big issue: who decides on another person’s gender, on which criteria, and what should be the rite of passage from their former opinion (at birth: this is a boy/girl) to their revised opinion (we formally accept that we were mistaken at birth)?

To say that it matters to anyone but the individual, is like saying there is a rule whereby a flower may not be described as purple, only as either dark red or blue. If the flower is happy to be regarded as one or the other by the observer’s definition, well and good. But if the flower is purple and regards itself on the blue end rather than red, or steadfastly says it is purple, why should it matter? Gender queer and bisexual exist, and we know what we are in ourselves anyway. Yes, really.

More than that, why is it in anyone’s gift to say that I am not a woman, female? All that exists of male in me is a skeleton that has a form directed by a small chemical during growth (testosterone), and a prostate (because the risk of removal is not worth it). I have yet to see a reason, based on equality of rights. The only arguments derive from male primacy in our culture, and that is not a right, it is a wrong.

The arguments people have tried on me against this view are all about deceit and disguise for the purposes of intrusion. Trans* people do not do this. Gender dysphoria is not a behaviour.

And so back to the business of diagnosis, terms and criteria.

I observed, in completing the survey comments, that the only task of a psychiatrist in the whole process of confirming that someone’s gender is not indicated accurately by their genitals, is to eliminate psychological indicators for anything else. The psychiatrist who finds nothing permits the diagnosis of a physiological problem. The dissonance (or incongruence, if you prefer) does not originate in the mind, but in physiological events that stimulated development of primary sexual characteristics at odds with the sense of self.

Once more: gender dysphoria is not a behaviour, and that is why I also baulk at the use of the term ‘transsexualism’ in the definitions of gender dysphoria. This is not about rights to do anything, it is about the right to be authentic.

When it comes to rights (maybe Rights) society has to recognise the way things really are, decide how to act on this, and ensure that treatment is fair and applied. The problem with the Gender Recognition Act, is that the importance of being ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ has been over-emphasised. You must decide! And show such decisiveness that everyone knows unmistakeably what you are and why! Dear Ms God: Why? Can people not just ask each other and leave it at that?

Rites

Since we are all assigned a gender descriptor at birth (again, I can’t quite understand the necessity for this, unless we are destined to be treated differently) the first rite of gender is naming. After that we all have the right to write the name we want, and to have this changed officially and easily.

Over our first decade, we can experience a variety of feelings about whether we ‘feel like’ a boy or a girl. It isn’t just about toys or clothes, but where we belong. Being a tomboy, or a girly boy defines nothing either. But in ourselves we have feelings about where we do and do not belong, and sooner or later these settle.

Puberty isn’t exactly a rite of passage in Western Europe, but menstruation or a breaking voice are part of ‘becoming’ a man or a woman, and ambiguous, or non-happening aspects of puberty are troubling to parents and worrying to children. But for the trans* child, this is a rite of passage that terrifies. Who holds the rights now? Parents? Clinicians? Or the child themselves?

The problem with rites, formal or otherwise, is that they fix things that then have to be undone. The greatest favour an adult can do for a trans* child is to listen, believe and stop the clock. Delayed puberty is the least harmful outcome. So why do we so often hear an outcry about children being manipulated, with misunderstandings about treatment methods? Yes, we need proper diagnostic pathways and expert professionals, the right terminology for the most transparent description, and we need it not to sound trivial (I think ‘incongruence’ is), so that treatment is taken seriously.

The final rite we face in the UK, is the appeal under the Gender Recognition Act, to the Gender Recognition Panel, for a Gender Recognition Certificate. This enables a new, revised, correct, birth certificate to be created. Having had almost zero professional support for the past few years, my paperwork is presented as a testimony to endurance. I have no right, without scrutiny, to formally identify in my true gender. I can call myself what I like, write what I like, but officially, until I can prove and explain what I have done clinically and why, or what I have not done clinically and why (even though what I have done clinically, or not, does not affect the outcome of my application), I am still officially a man.

Tell me, as I write, is this rite right?

Summary

We still desperately need good writing, by diverse trans* people, to explain the reality of gender dysphoria, however we variously describe it. We need our rights to own our own gender without interference, suspicion and policing by people who have not lived this. And we might even benefit by better rites of passage than exhaustive documentation of how we have survived transition with very little support or help, in an expensive plea to reverse that birth certificate bestowed on us with so little thought or necessity, so long before.

And if you read the stories in the media about those of us who transition young, or old, or unwisely, or cheaply, or expensively – please remember that each of us is every bit as human and a person as you. We are not separate, or other, with fewer rights, or to be viewed as deceitful or fraudulent, or psychologically disordered.

No; just imagine that you are the one instead, who has to prove their case for their own sense of self, and buy a certificate to say they really are what they say they are. Right?

Continue reading Writes, rights, rites »

Care to leave a comment? »