I sat on the end of my bed this week to pull on socks, and broke the rail. No big deal, except that it’s the bed I made very soon after my wedding, out of about £20-worth of wood, to a design sketch that I still have (left), in biro on a scrap of ruled notepad. Degree finals exam notes are written on the back! It is still a bit special, and I’m glad I was allowed to claim it when I left. The problem is that it’s pine, and this is the one place where a large knot shouldn’t…
On Tuesday this week, I had an appointment, to return to the hospital I left two months ago and review things. You know, those things. There is often a need to make minor adjustments, because as things heal and any swelling goes down, not everything may be quite as good as it can be – even peeing slightly sideways can be worth correcting – and sometimes a bit of cosmetic improvement is needed. I’ve been happy enough, from my mirror-and-feeling-around point of view, but there is always a chance that something might come up in the conversation to suggest a…
Now that the gender dysphoria bit is over, I am walking over some old ground, just picking up stones, those things that hurt the feet of people following after me. You see, I remember walking down Fulham Palace Road to the gender identity clinic the first time, knowing every step of the way had been trodden by so many like me, and quite a few with familiar names …
Well, in recent months, maybe this past year, there have been more and more sensible and informative media events about trans people. Some more competent than others, some quite personal and individual, others more documentary style and explanatory. But overall, quite a lot is being said that reveals us as pretty ordinary folk, living ordinary lives. The trans celebs who are noticed more are just saying the same as us as well, which brings us all down to a level, a commonality.
Suddenly if feels just OK to be trans, and here am I fussing over my privacy being broken at work! I transitioned before I got my current job, and it still felt like I was the peculiar one, so much so that I welcomed my work colleagues being warned in advance that a transsexual employee was on her way – so behave! And now I don’t want anyone to be told, whilst at the same time posting my photo on Twitter under #WhatTransLooksLike, which turns out to be terribly (confusingly) ordinary.
And yet.
And yet all of this ordinariness and growing acceptance (at least in general, and from a very poor start) underlines something extremely sad and tragic. And it is that for the majority of us it has been a mixture of terrifying struggle, self harm, self hatred, self doubt, despair, loss, depression and suicidal intent.
I want you to think: how much do you talk (or hear) about how society ‘tolerates’ trans people? Or about an increasing ‘acceptance’? At work, it seems people have been ‘accommodating’ of my being trans among them. Are these feelings you have, as a way of saying things are getting better? How do you think it would make you feel, if something about you meant that you as a person needed tolerance, acceptance or accommodation? Or knowing this, would you willingly place yourself in a position where this would even need to be so?
In a world that really accepted that some people are born trans, things would be completely different. Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that every child growing up was free to express their male-female-both-neither selves freely and without criticism. Imagine every adult simply knew this was the way things are. Imagine no penis-adult minded a penis-child wearing vagina-child clothes, and no vagina-adult minded a vagina-child avoiding vagina-child toys. How comfortable those children would be that the other children knew this from their parents too. Each could find their sexuality as they developed, and learn the differences between love for reproduction and love for friendship and love for life. It isn’t that families would cease to exist, or that adults settled in their gender would not pair up to have children. But just maybe, everyone would be a bit more comfortable doing what comes naturally. Fewer spouses would turn away from their beloved partners because it was all a mistake, had they known before. Maybe it would help break the sexism that pervades society, if it were not odd to find a woman with oily hands, power tools and an executive job, paired with a man in feminine clothes working as a childminder and organising dance events.
People on the trans spectrum may be one in a hundred, but that doesn’t make us rare, it just means most are invisible because they are suppressed.
I do wonder what proportion of trans people would be happy to be the woman with a penis or a man with a vagina, if nobody else minded either. Not all of us, because gender dysphoria runs much more deeply than this, and there is a level of inateness that predates any social expectation. But for some whose gender identity sits uncomfortably in the gender binary based on genital expectation, maybe, just maybe, there would be peace in growing up and living a normal life freely as they feel themselves to be.
Where are we with acceptance now? This is how it has largely been for people like me: if you feel you don’t belong with other penis-children-called-boys, you belong nowhere. You do not fit and you cannot explain it. Somehow people, especially parents and teachers, don’t want to know, because you screw up the way things are, and you make things awkward. You add something that has to be catered for and coped with. You are a nuisance to them and to yourself. If you are a vagina-child who doesn’t belong with other vagina-children-called-girls, people don’t notice quite so much at first. But underneath the tomboy is a place grown-ups don’t want to go.
Somehow there is an undercurrent to this view of you that is linked with a moral or ethical dimension. These are the rules that seem to come from nowhere, and just ‘are’ because they get repeated. What you feel is not quite right about you, in terms of likeness with others, becomes something wrong. People don’t like it because they think you are being deliberately different, that you have a choice. Some will say that it (the way you feel about yourself) isn’t natural. Others will say that their god says it’s bad, and bad that you should dare to even think it might be OK. That you must therefore change, and put all these feelings about yourself away forever. Hence the prevalent self hate, self harm and self destruct, mental and physical that trans people experience.
Worst of all, gender and sex have long been so confused a distinction that being trans has been viewed a sexual perversion, a bizarre psychological pathology. And if sex is naughty or dirty or bad (my upbringing taught me this), then being trans is doubly so.
Because the adults think this, their children, your friends and classmates think this too. You get bullied, or at best left out and seen by some as not to be included. This combines with your sense of not belonging. There is no way out, because no-one is talking about it, leastways not so as to allow that it’s natural or normal or permissible.
This, as I grew up (and is widely still the case), was an inescapable truth about myself: there was something bad and wrong about me, deep inside. Trans people simply knew there was nothing they could do to get rid of the disconnect between being a penis-child and a vagina-brain. Cis people, generally speaking, thought they could and should. And now this is changing, bit by bit.
If you are not sure whether this move or drift towards trans-as-normal is comfortable for you, think what it does to trans people growing up, and the legacy it has left to those of us rather older. I’m not seeking pity – far from it, only saying please understand, when you think you are being kind for letting us live and look differently, that your attitudes and reactions, if anything short of full acceptance as equal and normal, are creating inner traumas still.
I fully recognise that I did not grow up recognising diversity, that I too felt uncomfortable with everything LGBT because it is what I was taught to think and feel. What this means is that the denial I lived with, and above all the guilt, must have been there as I brought up my own children. My son thankfully was trans-aware probably before I was. And my daughter’s current inability to be associated with me in any way must in part be down to what I brought her up to think. I wonder what she will teach her children one day when they ask about their missing grandfather …
Does anything strike you about these statements? If this is how we bring up our children, and how we speak to each other about red-haired people, left-handed people and lesbian people, they will intuitively understand that these three ‘conditions’ are suspect and not quite right, that these are people to be wary of, who are not quite what they seem (Wait until she takes her hat off! Did you see when he started writing? I went to her mum’s house once and she lives with a woman!).
This is exactly the inference we exchange amongst ourselves about transgender people. This is why it took me 55 years to realise that my self-hatred, my sense of guilt and shame, my constant self-destruction inside was completely unfounded and unnecessary.
Can you begin to understand this stone in the grass that I’ve picked up? Don’t leave it for someone else, above all someone else’s child, to cripple themselves on.
I can at last love myself, and indeed, I love my ‘new’ body for the first time. Shame about the five decades.
Never tolerate me. Never accept me. Never accommodate me.
I am. We are.
Just like you.
Continue reading Watch words: self hate, self harm, self destruct »
There was a time when people with congenital deformities accepted that the only way to survive was to accept a place in a freak show. A woman with a lot of facial hair would be the ‘bearded lady’ and sit to be stared at, talked and laughed and wondered at, rather than try to live a difficult life in the mainstream. The circus at least meant acceptance, and probably the friendship of other ‘freaks’. She probably had polycystic ovaries.
Accepting being different, knowing being different, exhibiting being different was a response to misunderstanding and exclusion for being different. We aren’t there any more, are we?
I remember the pain of watching Little Britain, and the falsetto cross-dressing sketches: ‘Aim a laaydee! Come orn Emily, let’s do laaydees’ things!’. Long before, I remember the awkwardness of Monty Python and the very popular ‘I’m a lumberjack’ and the transvestite bit of the song. These and many similar jests were all saying to me that I could either laugh with it (and everyone else) and be a secret freak, or expose myself as a freak and be laughed at. Where was the in-between recognition that a joke was being made out of valid non-binary, non-heteronormative identity?
I recall documentaries: don’t show too much interest in wanting to watch the programme, or you might give something away. Don’t show enough interest, and there is no opportunity to introduce an aspect of yourself and have a sensible dialog. There was My Transsexual Summer, the Channel 4 series in 2011, just as I was coming out, where six people of mixed age range and stages of transition came together over a period of weeks to share their experiences and aspirations. This was unavoidable, informative, presented to retain an audience, not quite entertainment, not quite just factual. ’You don’t want to do that though, do you?’ Scary.
How many tabloid front page headlines have we seen, exposing a ‘sex-swap sensation!’? I know several people who have been that person on the page. How does this make other people feel, who have any questions about their gender identity? Safe? At risk? Normal? Bizarre? The only difference between headlines and TV series, is the duration. Last week’s headlines get forgotten because it isn’t this week’s news. A series – with personalities, celebrities, oddities – becomes part of social dialogue, workplace conversation, pub sharing with an edge of inebriation. This is the point where the trans person, suspected trans person, gender queer, ambiguously-identified person gets drawn in for comparison.
It has been a good season in the media by and large, with prominent trans personalities receiving awards and accolades, and significant articles being written that situate gender identity in objective sociological contexts where it can become mainstream and ordinary. We have also just had a tabloid turn towards the better. Two tabloids were kept at bay by legal injunction from outing Kellie Maloney until she achieved a deal on her terms with another. The big difference? The media expected a real sensation as the boxing world turned on the freak man-become-woman sex-swap fantasy. Only it didn’t. Kellie was embraced and accepted, better still, supported. End of story. Almost.
Predictably, however good the story was as it rattled around, and however reassuring the story about the non-story became in the wider media, comment threads online continued to feature hatred and bigotry, ridicule and rejection. Any trans-emergent person breathing a sigh of relief over Kellie was at once confronted by obvious and unchanging social hostility. This level will take a long time to resolve, just as despite social acceptance in LGB matters has brought almost complete social acceptance, has not deterred attempts to sensationalise sports men and women coming out, nor the comments people feel obliged to leave online. Nevertheless, when it comes to LGB issues, bigots really do look like bigots. Hatred is seen as hatred. Religious intolerance is seen as sickening.
I wonder if we are anywhere near this with trans issues though. It’s back to my ‘midas touch’ theory. Anyone can defend a top sports personality, in regular conversation, and accuse a friend of being homophobic or intolerant, because they know that (a) their friends won’t respond by saying ‘oh, so you’re gay too then?!’, and (b) even if they were gay themselves, it would not matter. Joke over, sensation over. Mild surprise; end of. The trans scenario? More likely a jest about secretly wearing a dress on Friday nights.
Transsexuality, less-known as gender dysphoria, is still viewed in the popular mind as a sexual thing: fetish, intrusive, threatening. It is something that you cannot align yourself with in understanding, because you don’t. Accepting that society has a substantial peppering with trans people feels unsafe. Despite the triviality of the figures, there are always comments that ‘I hope they’re not expecting me as a taxpayer to pay for their surgery’. Ignorance is rife, objectivity is a stranger. If it isn’t this, then it is seen as a psychological disorder: wrong in the head, even if it’s getting better described in the DSM manual of diagnosis (the universal Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders issued by the American Psychiatric Association). Transsexuality remains a curiosity, an embarrassment by association. All of this makes the trans person in society a thing rather than a person, unlike gay and lesbian people.
‘I saw Conchita Wurst [Eurovision winner 2014], and thought of you!’
‘I see Keith, er Kellie, Maloney is on Big Brother! Isn’t that good? I thought of you.’
And the ensuing conversation:
‘Did you see Big Brother last night? And Kellie! Not surprised she’s scared. Nadia did alright though didn’t she? Still, being transsexual is a bit freaky isn’t it? Is she gay?’
‘Oh yes, and didn’t you know, that woman who works upstairs, Andie. She’s a transsexual.’
‘Oh, is she? Has she still got her bits – you know?’
‘Don’t know. The Mirror says Kellie has. You can have it done on the NHS.’
Of course it won’t happen. Of course. I don’t mind if it does. Just don’t stare at my crotch. I’ve been in hospital and away a few weeks. Work it out.
Really, I don’t mind that much, except that the chatter goes round and the focus drifts away from whether I can do a professional job without this junk going on in the background. Nor do I want you to download that plug-in, called ‘acceptance’. Do I have one for you, to accept that you are normal, cis, hetero, gay, whatever?
I’m lucky, it probably won’t happen like this at all, but what I am illustrating is that participation in the media as a trans person does not make you a good representative, or ambassador, and does not necessarily help other trans people, closeted or otherwise. Too few trans people writing and presenting reduces the perception of our natural diversity. Being young and with a stimulating back story of incarceration, drugs, prostitution, is great for people in that zone. But the ordinary middle-aged person who simply loses their lifetime of family, prosperity and love? They lost it because society is not ready for them, and the story is boring. What do you expect, sympathy? No. I just want you to know how many of us there are, who remain invisible, disadvantaged, lonely simply because all you know about us is that we are separate, different, challenging. Even knowing us, changes you. And I’m simply asking: why?
The way to change popular perception is through education, not entertainment. Unfortunately, even news has become entertainment, and I for one, was very glad when trans people walked away from BBC Newsnight, refusing to be part of an entertaining debate on the validity of the trans identity.
More fundamentally, why is any trans person, famous or otherwise, a story at all, let alone a component for entertainment? The Victorian bearded lady had polycystic ovaries. I was born with whatever caused my gender dysphoria.
This is a really difficult area, but one I don’t want to duck. There is no simple answer, but it does contribute to the acceptance of trans women as women. In essence, are trans women being accepted as women (e.g. in feminist circles) whilst simultaneously being implicitly told that they are not ‘real women’, because their bodies, and hence physical experiences, are not complete as female?
The question fundamentally is whether transwomen can be included in discussions surrounding conception, pregnancy, fertility, giving birth and nursing, or whether because they cannot, they should step aside and keep quiet. Is it an intrusion or a presumption to enter these discussions? Is it seen as invasion of the male patriarchy all over again, if only psychologically? Is it entering a unique preserve of ‘womyn born womyn’? I was intending to use this phrase throughout, but it is too redolent of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) so let’s settle on women assigned female at birth, or cis.
I have written twice recently about sexism at work, because I receive it. But this is at brain level: I cannot be worth as much in my abilities and knowledge because I am a woman, and until proven exceptional, am inferior. I therefore feel comfortable taking a feminist stance, and indeed many men do the same. It is a matter of equality and fairness that anyone could see and participate in.
When it comes to matters of child-bearing though, this is physiological. I ventured to say that I felt closer now to the issues that mothers feel on returning to work after childbirth: the diminishing, the setbacks, the presumed loss of commitment to work, the distrust. I shall soon return to work, not with a baby at home, only with my own kind of ‘maternity leave’ (because I have queried whether my experience was nearer to being born or giving birth). That in itself is only a thought experiment, not about actually giving birth to a baby.
Nevertheless, it did raise the matter in my mind about the mother-identity among trans women.
When people with gender dysphoria express themselves as having the wrong body (however fundamental or not that is experienced as being), it means just that. Not the wrong genitalia, but the wrong everything. We may just as much resent facial hair, larynx, hand size, head shape as the genitals, and indeed as the missing bits. Faces can be reshaped, bones modified for more gracile features. Breasts can easily be developed, because they are already there, if dormant, and indeed can lactate. Penile inversion to create a neo-vagina is routine and satisfactory. But whilst testes can be removed, and thereby the source of testosterone, ovaries cannot be implanted to avoid the need for pills, and the post-surgery trans woman still has no uterus.
This may leave the trans woman with a degree of residual gender dysphoria, but most of us have already grown to accept that there is nothing that can be done. Younger trans people may live in hope of future transplant techniques, and some meantime at least seek to store their gametes before surgery so they can be blood-parents at some stage afterwards.
In my mind, this places us in a similar position as women born infertile, or without a uterus, and women who have had a hysterectomy before being able to conceive. We all identify completely as women in ourselves, and none of us will ever know what it means to be pregnant, or give birth.
Or maybe it isn’t about bodies at all? Is it about the maternal instinct that only cis women can experience, and therefore we as trans women cannot?
Initially I am reminded that many women have little or no maternal instinct. Some only develop it during pregnancy, and many lose it afterwards in post-natal depression. Maternal instinct may also not be so distinct from paternal instinct. Both seek fulfilment and both give rise to powerful nurturing urges. It is fairly common for fathers to envy their wives’ abilities to breastfeed, and this is only partly alleviated by bottle-feeding, even with the mother’s own expressed milk.
I am therefore unsure that I can honestly affirm that the maternal instinct is there in all cis women, and if not, why it should not be present and genuine in trans women. It may well be stimulated by hormones (hence increase during pregnancy and loss in postnatal depression), but there will be other factors, including socialisation, the presence of similar-age siblings, other caring experiences etc. I don’t believe it is genetic or a product of the absence of Y chromosomes.
What I can say is that I have heard enough trans women speak of their maternal feelings to know that it isn’t an invention to support their sense of authenticity.
There is a clear difference between the younger transitioned woman and the transitioned parent. For the former, there is a whole life ahead that may never include your own genetic children, which in itself can be quite a devastating and unbearable thought. This is no different from the cis woman facing the same reality for similar biological reasons. For the latter, there may be custody battles, severance, separation or rejection that cloud the joys of the parent-child relationship, and the loss of a very young family can be traumatic. Alternatively, a whole new positive relationship can evolve into a kind of belated or adoptive motherhood. But in retrospect, does one re-remember the maternal/paternal experience? I think it may well.
What do I remember? I can’t claim to be representative, but I do very clearly remember being present at the birth of both my babies. Seeing my wife in pain, then joy, and then in pain requiring some surgical repair, and then nursing, expressing milk, but only to a small degree able to include me in the initial nurturing. I remember the shared things: changing nappies, burping, jogging to sleep, bathing, singing, dressing, changing … I don’t suppose my remembering is very different in these things.
I do remember the feeling of exclusion from a powerful experience, and I can’t claim that to be different from any father. But it wasn’t that feeling of losing the focus of attention and affection. It was just that of ‘I can never do this’ and a sinking feeling.
So my contribution to the argument that unless you are a cis woman you can’t enter the discourses of pregnancy or motherhood, is to say that being trans is not the only way of being excluded. You also have to exclude every infertile woman and every woman who had declined motherhood for any other reason. And indeed any other woman yet to conceive. Instead, I invite you to step into the skin of the trans woman who knows that her incomplete body is an accident of birth, and feel her grief of knowing that she can never conceive, carry a baby and give birth – even if she could lactate and nurse.
In retrospect, I may remember early days in a more motherly way, not to usurp my wife’s role, but because I actively feel different now about babies and about motherhood. Maybe it’s the hormones, but if so it isn’t because I am a trans woman, but because it’s the same hormones as any cis woman. But what I will say is that it isn’t a pretence to bolster my proclaimed authenticity as a woman, nor a cover-up for a patriarchally privileged upbringing in order to be more included. My maternal feelings are real, because they are also part of my identity, my sense of self.
OK, so it’s obvious? Maybe. But it can also be enough to cause real upset and misunderstanding, when a trans woman engages in dialogue over fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and sexism or feminism, and is excluded because she can never know the experience first hand. I feel it is tantamount to saying that a trans woman is fully accepted as a woman – until it comes to the unique experiences of cis women, in which case the trans woman is, of course not quite a ‘real woman’.
And all I am inviting, is for this aspect of trans womanhood to be fully acknowledged, not as usurping the role of ‘real’ women, but as a tragedy every bit as real as for any infertile woman wanting to conceive. We may have the comfort of having our own genetic offspring, but this an amelioration, not proof that we are not real women.