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Suddenly, the suspended sentence …

  • Posted on April 5, 2014 at 9:19 am

I returned to dancing last night, my first opportunity in a month after playing in an orchestra for a concert, which occupied the same evening of the week. It was really lovely to see friends again, have a hug or two and dance, and dance, and sweat, and express and release. I had it marked in my diary as ‘2 years!’

On April 4 2012, someone, somewhere, date stamped my deed poll, and I became legally Ms Andie.

I’ve gone through other two-year markers, but this is the one that is taken as the starting blocks for transition and eligibility for true recognition in your own gender identity. Until this point, the assertion is that you are still in your birth-assigned gender, and that anything else is unproven. For two years I have been Ms Andie by name only, with the proviso that if I could make it through, I would have the right to apply to legally change my gender marker, including my birth certificate. It is true that, had I faltered, I would be referred to as a man, trying to be something I wasn’t. It has been just like a suspended sentence, and that period is now over for good.

A quick review then of living under a suspended sentence

I remember the day I simply gave up waiting for approval, and filled in my deed poll application. Downloaded forms, filled in and signed, no second thoughts about a very simple name, taken to a good friend to be witnessed, a small cheque and into the post. And the day it came back, date stamped stating that I was no longer entitled to be addressed for any official purpose by any other name.

I remember clearing my wardrobe and drawers. Some to the textile recycling, most to a charity shop. And the feeling of returning home to the absence of all the old trappings, my own clothes no longer crushed into the wardrobe.

This was the time when all intimacy in my life ended, and I have known none since. Family life (my daughter aside) continued for another six months, but I was no longer welcome in my own home. I made it through my son’s graduation in Falmouth, which was a big enough and public enough event, with all the other parents around, but no-one gave me a look or batted an eyelid.

This was the start of my assessment too. One month after the deed poll (yes, after!) I saw the first of four psychiatrists, in order to be assessed as to whether I was mentally or emotionally disturbed or whether, indeed, I was born transsexual. The suspended sentence began.

Soon after the deed poll I also knew I needed to find employment; being self-employed wasn’t guaranteed to provide an income for life on my own. Partly by chance I gained the opportunity to do some consultancy, and that turned into full-time employment within three months. It was the first time in 30 years that I was not a manager, and it has been both safe but frustrating. I found complete acceptance at work, and to be honest, looking at my photos from the time, I can see that courage and confidence was everything!

With the start of work, the same week, I started self-prescribed hormones and testosterone blockers. Carefully, and researched, but yes, against the rules, because I knew that clinical attention was going to take a long time. It did; in fact it took a year before I was able to gain prescriptions. Several very widely-spaced trips to London and the gender identity clinic, dragged me across the two years entirely beholden to the judgement of others. It was like being called in to check the terms and compliance of my probation. There were no hiccups in terms of my feelings about myself, and no doubts ever expressed over my declared identity, just a lot of time, misleading expectations, and ultimate failure to deliver timely clinical interventions.

Back to June 2012 though, and I hit rock bottom just two months after the deed poll. I felt destined never to be truly regarded as a woman. Or indeed as a man. Rather, it hit me hard that I had to face the rest of my life being nothing. Excluded from normal human expectations, I felt it was better not to live at all. I knew that I may never be truly loved and cherished ever again. I might have been right; I’ve just learned for now to live with it. In therapy at this time, I made a promise to myself not to kill myself, and I have a token of that promise in the form of a piece of quartz crystal I was given, that stays at my bedside.

And just two months after this I knew, for my own safety from myself, I had to move out on my own. This was the worst time of all, and I’ve written enough about it. But I found a lovely place to go, very quickly and easily, and by October I was living on my own, stranger to my family, confirmed in permanent employment, and learning to rebuild a domestic life in my own style. I would not have done this at all well without the help of just a few, and one particular, close friend.

It took until the end of the year to actually have my first appointment at the gender identity clinic, but being a woman in the world, feeling the effects of hormones, and finding my feet with no shadow of the past dragging me back, was wonderful. I had a public poetry reading at the South Bank, a very lonely Christmas, discovered dance, finally shed the prosthetic aids (boobs and hair) took myself back to counselling to straighten out my grief and loss, went through a very instructive episode of pneumonia all before appointment number two in London. By this time (May 2013) I was feeling so completely naturalised in living my gender that having to submit to these consultations was annoying. The third (not until September 2013, was deeply irritating). But the May diagnosis did at least get me the prescriptions.

Summer brought me into regular Five Rhythms dance, from which I have never recovered. It is my deepest expression of self amongst some of the nicest and most genuine people I have met, and a season of small-group workshops in the autumn was an added privilege.

Autumn 2013 saw me cleared for gender confirmation surgery, and the story of how I am now fast tracked for July treatment is in recent blogs. I finally sold the marital home, bought a flat nearer to friends, and settled. Three months ago I was divorced. From now on, it’s just me.

So much more has happened, but all these things have been with a sense of very normal living, a deep gratitude for being finally ‘allowed’ to be myself, finding great happiness in that, and knowing day by day that I’m ‘getting there’. Not easy, and I have been a real pain to even my best friends at times, but I am where I should be, not just where I want to be.

Judgement over

What this blog is about, is simply that all these major changes have happened under the banner of the suspended sentence, termed variously as ‘real life experience’, ‘living as a woman’ and so on, as if it were all temporary, subject to change and approval before I could ‘really’ claim to be be myself, a woman, and not just transgendered or transsexual. It is as much an affirmation that I have not changed, I have just found myself.

April 4, 2014; finally the suspended sentence …

… is over.

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A moving story

  • Posted on October 19, 2013 at 7:24 pm

This week on Facebook, a friend shared a video about some whale conservationists who came upon an apparently dead humpback. It was just lying very still in the water near their boat, but then it blew. Cautious investigation revealed that it was completely entangled in fishing net and lines, its tail fin and both pectorals bound, so it could not swim. It was in straightjacket of nylon mesh, with no means to free itself. But it was alive, so the conservationists needed to release it. A humpback of course is an extremely powerful animal, and they could not communicate to make the creature understand their intentions. How do you make a whale stay still until it is not just partly free, but entirely so? (You can’t even do it with a child!)

It was a very moving story because, in the course of hours, a diver was able to cut the mesh away. Part-way through the whale did swim off and feel some limited freedom, but its powerful tail was still enmeshed. It returned, and allowed the helpers to continue until it was completely freed. For an hour after that it stayed near the boat, giving an exuberant display of breaching and tail slaps, and everything else a whale does when it is enjoying itself. Was this just a ‘whoopee-freedom!’ behaviour, or a way of saying thank you? Of course we can’t really know, but animal behaviour without our kind of language can be sophisticated and highly intentional. This week we also learned on the news that marmosets, for example, will talk but never interrupt each other. We have much to learn about our apparently superior selves.

Bound to be cut loose

I too am lying in the water right now, feeling very constrained, and at a point of being cut loose. My mail has already ben redirected to a new address, my Internet connection has been terminated, my main email address has gone forever, I am surrounded by cardboard boxes, nothing is accessible, and I am yet to exchange contracts on the flat I am buying. I am lying in trust that, as I have been provided for over these last few years (I think I was too blind to notice before that), everything will work out just fine, and that I shall not be homeless at the end of the month in just over a week!

It feels almost like a necessary thing. All my email clutter that had built up has gone. Yes, I must reregister my logins with all sorts of things, from buying flowers and ordering clothes online, to website redirects, annual accounts and so on. I hope my memory and imagination are good! But in a way, it is a cutting loose from an interim stage where my email address reflected the year I came to understand myself (andie2010@). I am even unable to upload this blog until I visit an Internet-enabled café or a friend, or go into work. I can’t lookup addresses and directions to places, and email is awkward on my little mobile. I am in some ways electronically free from distraction and all the unimportant falling leaves. But I can still write, and I can focus on packing up my last things. It may be my last weekend in this current refuge.

Last night in dance I had a lovely time, sharing movement with several people, feeling really expressive – until the last piece of music, which was very poignant and clear: ‘not going home’. I can’t remember what the song was, but it cut me down completely, and I just could not dance my way through it. This week my house was sold and others moved in. I shall never again return to a place that was home. This is more than moving house together, from one home to another, as always before. This is a complete cutting away of shared space, for good. And I mean that in both ways. But I can’t celebrate this by leaping in the water, because it is a profound sadness: that it is all because I was never loved for myself in those spaces anyway. All my memories are now tempered by that knowing.

I wonder how bound I was before, with all that accumulated clutter? How bound was I, knowing there was something essentially and innately wrong but unknown, that led me into being so afraid of what I was, and of how tenuous that love I knew, really was? I think I was enmeshed a long time ago. Better, I thought, to be loved with pectorals bound to my sides, than to be free in a vast and lonely ocean.

New owner

At the end of the dance workshop this week, I expressed that I feel for the first that I really own my body. The context? These workshops are about anatomy, about corporeal awareness, about fluidity and connectedness. And in asking where the group needed focus (for example we have worked with the fluid in joints, and with breathing), someone asked for attention to the sexual and reproductive organs. I’ve said before how my innermost awareness is of organs in my body that simply are not there. I will have my restorations in due course, but how can I fully explore this in a way that an unambiguous man or woman can? I am happy to disclose my gender issues with this group – after all, I must be obvious, even if acceptable and welcomed, which I am. If someone suggested I work with what I do have, that would be every bit as psychologically threatening as being asked to wear a tie (or explain why not) in a brass band. So what do I do? Cut the net away and work with the body I do know, imagined, felt and real in equal measure?

What I do feel right now, is that I have the opportunity of discovering and building a new life, providing I am happy that others are cutting me free, and that I am happy to celebrate in an ocean that may not be as empty as I have feared. And that means a new ownership of what is uniquely mine, not what is seen on the outside.

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A stitch in time

  • Posted on August 22, 2013 at 11:14 pm
Picture of Mam Tor from flanks of Lose Hill

On Sunday evening I walked out of my hotel in Hathersage (Derbyshire / Peak District National Park), across the road, and back into a view and a countryside I first walked alone over 40 years ago. Sheep were bleating across the slopes, the air was clear, and the rural smells took me right back to the times I walked everywhere with a too-small-scale map, straight off the bus and into open country. And if I couldn’t afford the bus, I just walked to where the bus would have stopped, and carried on walking. I dropped down the slope, crossed the…

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Cause, fault, blame, responsibility: an uncomfortable family

  • Posted on April 12, 2013 at 1:32 pm

Some long while ago I wrote on this blog in response to the accusation many people born trans face: that they are being selfish. (Self, Self(ish), Selfish)

What do people see? They see a person whom they thought quite stable and happy, suddenly doing something quite bizarre. And that apparent behaviour intrudes on their lives, disrupts and challenges it, whilst insisting on acceptance. That is not always forthcoming; families are destroyed by lack of understanding and unreadiness to change. Is this still the same person? Even a clinical diagnosis is met with scepticism. This, surely is a derangement, a lifestyle choice. With all our shared social conditioning, this is weird.

Blame

A man does not become a woman in our world. They become some pretence, some male-looking actor mistakenly persuaded that their role belongs in real life. Somewhere between this perception and the reality, so often, destructive and divisive forces are at work. I haven’t even been able to have the conversation with my grown-up daughter, to find out why we cannot even have dialogue about her impressions, feelings and perceptions. But surely there must be a mixture of confusion, embarrassment, anger and blame.

As I work out what possible grounds for divorce are honest and truthful, I compare this birth condition with others. A congenital muscle disorder that might leave me in a wheelchair? How disruptive is that, how life-changing, how relationship-changing? And yes, it can lead to marital breakdown, as can mastectomy or impotence. But blame? ‘I married a fit, strong man, not this!’ Is this completely different from gender? Is the love of the other really so different in each case?

Cause

My wife and I do not use the word ‘blame’. I consistently use the word ‘cause’, because I fully accept that the way I was born, being hidden so long, has resulted in loss of my family, marriage and home. I could no longer be ‘her man’. The operative element that has to be examined is choice. Why could I not have continued as I was? Well, all my life there was a part of me that I hated. I feared it; it was morally wrong to me, a perversion even. Largely unexpressed, but incapable of eradication. And therefore not something I could ever disclose. My wife said to me this week: ‘No-one should hate themselves.’ What kind of choice is this: between hating yourself – and being authentic but unloved and unwanted?

This is the result, and gender dysphoria is the cause. There is no blame. Why? Because my wife reacted and responded as the overwhelming majority of wives would. It’s very ordinary and simple really. As in my last blog, marriage is a self-serving contract; it is not really about the other at all. A wife has a husband for a reason, and if that husband is no longer going to play that male role, it’s over. Tough. I’ll let you be different if you’ll let me be normal, but don’t expect me to live with you, let alone want you like that. So there is a cause in the other too: conditioned normality within strict boundaries.

Fault

So much for cause but no blame. What about fault? Fault has several meanings. It can mean defective. This is my fault because there is something defective about me. It can mean a fault line. Two masses (or people) rubbing up alongside each other in contrary directions causing division and friction. It can mean the result of a careless or deliberate act that causes damage. Well, I still maintain that when a person experiences gender dysphoria, their transition into gender congruence is not a deliberate chosen act, but rather inevitable and perfectly fair and reasonable. There is no fault in being authentic: we are not nasty or even unloving people. Nor is it defect: only variance. 1 in 1,000 of us are to some degree intersex, 1 in 4,500 (birth identified) men and 1 in 8,000 women experience gender dysphoria. This is no defect deserving of rejection or blame. This is not fault.

The fault-line analogy is better. Both sides are working in opposite directions. So if fault has any meaning it belongs equally with the socially-conditioned partner for whom what the previously-loved partner is, matters vastly more than who they are. So love dies, because that is what it was founded on. This was our fault-line.

And so the cause, the blame, and the fault, when a family or a relationship fails under gender conflict, are equal. Neither side should bear more than the other. In a few cases, love is of a different kind. Perhaps sexuality is more fluid, or love more unconditional, or compassion profoundly greater. But losing everything is almost normal for the transitioning person, however lovely, loving, kind, talented, generous and committed they are. Person-hood does not play a part. I am fortunate compared with friends facing vindictiveness in partners. And in those cases, I do tend to feel that there is blame, simply because such attitudes are unjustified, deliberate and sustained.

Responsibility

And so finally, to ‘responsibility’. This is the missing word so often. It means whether you are the rejecting one or the rejected, you accept responsibility for the outcomes. Each must recognise the cause of their response, whether becoming authentic, or choosing to keep their norms unchallenged. And as above, this should be equal. As in my last blog, my marriage failed because of both of us. My dysphoria was the cause of my necessary change, but my wife’s conditioned normality was the cause of her rejection: our degrees of choice were perhaps not dissimilar. I shall not argue whether either of us could have resisted each of those pressures.

I took my responsibility by dissolving the emotional torture through leaving. I bore that burden first not just because I was no longer wanted, but because I felt I could and should. I had a life to develop and clear aims in achieving peace with myself after forty years. No-one was going to help me with that and I no longer hoped or expected it. But now we come to part two.

Part two is dispersal of our shared house and assets, and that means a secure family home that still exists, with cats and a productive garden, energy efficiency, and all we worked for together over 30 years. So it’s where the real hit is for my wife (son and cats), my daughter having just moved out to start on her own. It’s the end of everything, and it will hurt. Not me, so much, because I went through all that six months ago. I have nothing left other than the financial asset to help me find a more permanent and sustainable home. But I know it will raise in the others the same old feelings of cause, blame, fault – and responsibility. That too is equal. But I know that a new reality is sinking in for those who used to be my family; it’s time for them to realise their responsibility, not least in failing to gather around me when I needed it, and in the rejection that has now lost them their home too. They don’t even talk together about what has happened.

And that, however it is said, is not me blaming them. There are causes on both sides, there is responsibility too. And that needs to be fully recognised. ‘I take full responsibility for rejecting you and ending my love for you.’ How does that sound? I think it is fair, and perhaps worth voicing.

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Leaving peripherals behind; letting go (2)

  • Posted on January 26, 2013 at 3:32 pm

Winnie the Pooh: E.H. ShepherdThis is my 100th blog post. Not that it’s an achievement, only ‘OMG no-one’s going to read that any more’! But it has been therapeutic for me, helpful for some, and spoken for others, so I don’t think it’s a waste of time.

Anyhow, today’s reading is taken from the book of Pooh:

‘Hello, Rabbit,’ he [Pooh] said, ‘is that you?’

‘Let’s pretend it isn’t,’ said Rabbit, ‘and see what happens.’

How do you know when someone is pretending to be themselves?

 

In the privacy of your soul, there is something that no-one else can ever know. And it is you.

You think you can understand it, and if you can explain it, in words, an image, in music, by analogy, then another will know who you are, and understand.

They think they can understand it, because they are thinking, intelligent, empathic, and – like you – people with life experiences as parallels and comparisons.

And the most loving among us try so hard. But when it comes down to it, we fail. I don’t think I’m any better than anyone else at this. I just hope I am now learning that I can’t know another anything like they know themselves, and to respect that. And if I love them, to recognise what it is that I love.

I have tried so hard to explain what it means to be transgender. I’ve written poems and prose, made analogies and comparisons, intellectual arguments and philosophical positions. I’ve explained clinically, emotionally, psychologically, personally, objectively. And now I have to accept that this private part of my soul can never be understood or known. Even those with whom I have been most open, visible, vulnerable, for however long, will never really know.

And that is why I feel in my heart of hearts, that for most people, my transition will always be something I did, that I chose, that I elected to become – rather than something so innate that it has always been part of my being, my heart and soul. I no longer believe that I can say anything that could ever reach that level of knowing. If I could, maybe I would not lose the love I had; but I can’t. So I give up.

The importance of peripherals

It has to be of no consequence now what others think, or how they respond. I must simply live. And let go. It’s been ten months now, and those who don’t let go of me I shall be safe with. Those who do nothing as I do let go, aren’t good to hang onto. Those who think I have changed least are those closest to that private part of myself, those who think I have changed most are closest to my peripheral attributes.

And I also realise that I have to let go of those peripheral attributes too. One of these is ‘husband’. That’s easy, because it’s obvious and I never felt comfortable with the label: it presumed things that I didn’t want to be identified with in my love relationship. Another lies in things where I have led. I was a chair of governors for a school. I was lead trumpet in a band. I was a manager. I was active on many committees. I helped to lead a protest that took me all over the country and to Europe. Lots of things. Things I did naturally (and feel good about, to be honest), and that felt important at the time – in doing something worthwhile and being appreciated. I have very little of any of this left. It isn’t that I am nobody, just that the somebody I really am is here inside, in this privacy of the soul.

This week I have felt a bit battered by egos: people vying for position to be seen, heard, applauded, approved, included, better. All things I guess I have done too. And I have to let it all go, and say: sometimes it is enough just to be. Enough to be, even if there is no-one who loves you and to whom you are that really special person. (And there are so many trans people who lose their families.) I have to let go of what I was to others and dare to be alone, in the privacy of the soul. There, I have to learn, is enough security and resource, so long as I don’t compare myself with others. And enough to finally let go of everything I meant, to those who used to be closest to me.

I am nothing. I am everything.

For sure, I don’t ever want to find again that my peripherals are more loved than my essence. That sounds frightfully frightfully, doesn’t it? It just means that my sense of personhood matters far more than the clothes I wear or the profile of my body. Those things have to be congruent with my person, not the other way round. But I can never explain to you, if you have never known incongruence, that my peripherals do not define me, even if they are necessary for you to love me.

Giving up, letting go, walking away from people I never wanted to lose cannot be understood either. But I finally know I have to do it, and can, because I have come to accept that no-one else will ever understand what it is to be transsexual anyway. There is no more to say. I’m not walking away from love; I have withheld nothing. No, I’m walking away from only being accepted as something I am not.

The only way I can explain ‘blue’ to an unsighted person is by describing what it means to me. It matters not if I say the sky is blue, or give an electromagnetic frequency range. I can only say how blue is my favourite colour, it feels cool, or healing, or calm.

So as I walk away, as I let go, let me just say that knowing my gender is like ‘blue’ and I need to wear it. If you think you understand – if you want to – walk with me. You are most welcome.

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