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Who, what, and not just equality

  • Posted on February 10, 2013 at 12:57 pm

At the heart of so much inequality is the insistence that what we are matters more than who we are. A king is a king, no matter what their personality. A soldier, a leader, an engineer, all are wanted for what they are. They fulfil a role. And traditionally a woman has filled a role, a man has filled a role, and anyone feeling they were not what they appeared to be in this respect had no role. A wife had a role, a husband had a role, and similarly were wanted for what they were. You could be my husband because you are a man. You could never be my wife, because I am a woman.

It is much easier when we can know what we are by knowing what we are not. And to my mind, there was a lot of this behind the discussions of equal marriage. Why was it increasingly referred to and discussed as ‘gay marriage’ rather than ‘equal’? I think that many commentators, many politicians and journalists did not want it to be a matter of equality, because they do not regard people for who they are, but for what they are, and because they need reassurance of definitely not being ‘one of those’, themselves.

There is a lot I liked in null in the Commons this week. I really would commend its full reading to you, if you didn’t hear it. Even if you don’t particularly like him, because it contains a lot of common sense.

‘Let me speak frankly. “Separate but equal” is a fraud. “Separate but equal” is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus.’

In other words, you cannot do what I do, because you are not one of us. And if you are allowed to do what we do, you will inevitably change what we are too. We need separation! Never mind about me as a person or you as a person, think about what I am, what I represent, and what you are. ‘What’ matters more than ‘who’. And for the dogmatically ‘biblical’ (who interpret the bible so piecemeal and wrongly):

‘The Bible is complicated. But its enduring message is not that homosexuality is wrong, it is to “love thy neighbour”. It offers no caveats. “Love thy neighbour” whether they are black or white, rich or poor. “Love thy neighbour” whether they are short or tall, gay or straight, man or woman.

‘Love him, even if he used to be a she.

‘So how can we claim to love our neighbour if we do not allow them to love someone else in turn?’

Love has nothing to do with what you are, only to do with who you are. But the trouble is, we so easily define ourselves, find our security, but being something. We separate ourselves from criminals, because we do not wish to be associated with what they do. But that is also why prisons have revolving doors. We separate ourselves from the homeless because we would never take them in, and it is someone else’s job after all. We hope that someone else can see the person and meet their needs, but to us they are something we dare not get too close to. Politicians of a certain colour have been inclined to regard people without sufficient employment income as skivers, shirkers and work-shy, despite the many interviews with struggling individuals who cannot get out of their situation. The politicians never have to deal with the ‘who’ behind the ‘what’.

I am troubled by an NHS that, as far as I can see, treats my son’s condition as a thing, to see once in a while and ponder over, rather than seeing him as a person with something preventing him from finding work, having a meaningful life, and getting started on earning his pension fairly and equally with his peers. He needs care, not his condition.

Maybe you separate yourself from gay and lesbian people, because it reaffirms what you are, and you might be questioned by association. If you are gay or lesbian, you are likely to be defined as something in priority over who you are. And for many people I will not be me primarily, but ‘the woman who used to be a man’, classified by what before who.

And ‘what’ matters so much … I didn’t lose my daughter, wife, home, family, cousin, aunt because of who I am, but because they feel ‘I can’t be properly what I am if you are going to be one of those.’ (i.e. a woman, let alone a transwoman) Yes; in the most important ways, the ways that matter most to me, what I am really does trump who I am.

But then I recall 20 years ago thinking desperately that my sole role in life was in terms of what I could do, rather than being appreciated for myself. I even wrote poetry about it in a splurge of desperate creativity, likening myself to a stone cairn on a mountain track, where what was placed on me defined me and gave people their position, but wishing people would instead take a stone with them and value a part of me.

So what is love? I leave you with this from Iris Murdoch:

‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’

I just want someone to love me, fully, for who I am, not for my gender to be the first and most important question to be asked in order to give me legitimacy. Am I real? Touch me, I dare you …

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Seeing red. Letting go (3)

  • Posted on February 2, 2013 at 3:13 pm

heart for heart's sakeIt was a sudden reminder one day this week, as I walked around Brighton, to find all the card stalls had turned as pink and red as an open wound. And later on, Tesco to the right had become as red and raw as their meat counter to the left. It hurt.

Don’t look: ‘that’s the way to do it’.

It felt as disconcerting even to hear that response within myself, as I feel when faced by a Mr Punch’s fixed red grin and baton. Advice with a hint of cruelty. Not real, but unsettling.

It isn’t just the first year since I was 16 that I shall neither write nor receive that singular card; it’s the confusion of ineligibility. I wonder how many are given as a mark of infidelity? That’s OK: it’s still love. Discounting the inexorable sprawl of Valentines to encompass those from family and even pets, it seems these are cards for the genitally content. They celebrate the congruence of ‘your bits and mine’ as much as they celebrate ‘love’. I stepped outside that circle, and it closed on me. Actually, I’m not even loved as a neutered pet. My family has gone, so absolutely no cards, and no heart-shaped treats next to the food bowl.

Last week ended with a cinema visit to Les Misérables. Did I cry? You bet. Grim, cruel, yes. But essentially a story of loyalty, devotion, selflessness, refusal to be bowed in the face of hate and power. And the innocence and persistence of love. All those things touch me deeply, but are challenged by the understanding that the romantic, intimate kind of love is, in the end, all about appropriate sex. Being a woman and being trans has, in that respect, been little different from coming out with a desire for extreme BDSM. Why would anyone want to do that with someone like me? Except another. Except I don’t see myself as ‘other’ or ‘of a kind’. I have no specialism, no unusual desires. I am not looking for someone who shares something exotic in order to feel safe.

I am simply an ordinary woman with an unfortunate biological turn of events. But I want the natural love, shared outlook and interests, philosophy of life, fun and laughter, happiness in being together, not some once-a-week dungeon/safe place/club, with a like-minded sideliner. I want to meet in Tesco, or on the street and feel that mutual thrill simply of being and knowing. I want to be spontaneously kissed – and who cares who sees …

I have returned to counselling. I am not coping well in some ways. I have thought, and learned some, and written about letting go. But how do I relinquish my love and commitment, without it being a decision to not be loving and committed? I’m a Scorpio, and a very typical one. That includes intensity, an analytical mind, intuition, loyalty and sex. So this feels like carrying something so precious and valuable and personal, and being told at gunpoint to put it down and walk away. I still feel that walking away is cheating, unfaithful, even betraying myself and my values. And if I do? How shall I feel if ever I find someone for whom my gender is not a problem or issue?

I have to start believing now, that I have had all obligations, vows and promises, all understandings and undertakings, completely removed, and that it really isn’t my responsibility any more. I’m only putting down a slack cord that is tied to a big red heart balloon from which the last helium has escaped. There is no point holding on. But this is so hard for me to arrive at, that more talking through has become necessary. It’s one thing to be intellectual about it, quite another to let go and realise that I really am ‘free’. I want to have fun, I want to be found, I want to be wanted. I want to be loved, but for who I am in the most complete sense. I thought I was, so I am letting go of all my prior beliefs and hopes too.

This isn’t even about being transsexual any more. This is about being me and simply about loving and being loved.

Right now I just can’t see how the fun, finding, wanting, loving, completeness could ever possibly happen. I feel raw, punched. And I’m not being a miserable les about it, I just really can’t see it. Maybe, like last week’s blog, I should pretend it is – and see what happens.

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Charing Cross

  • Posted on December 15, 2012 at 12:08 am

For trans people living in the south (no, I said trans not trains!) the name Charing Cross carries a lot of emotion and feeling. I also remember it from the book 84 Charing Cross Road, but of course the place in question is in Hammersmith. And today, in the rain. A lot. You first learn of it as a place many (and some very well known) people have traipsed their years away to, and found resolution for their gender identity. Then you realise that it is part of West London Mental Health Trust, responding to gender dysphoria (or rather the physiological state of having a brain in one gender and a body in another) as a mental disorder. OK, since DSM V dropped the disorder bit, it isn’t that, but it is still in the mental health diagnostic manual, not in the physiological/hormonal disorders manual.

And so you are placed in the hands of psychiatrists. I saw my second psychiatrist today. When I see my third, for a Charing Cross second opinion, they will finally draw the conclusion that I am of perfectly sound (female) mind – and that the reason I have spent so much money, time and emotion (and pain), come to the edge of suicide (and backed away), lost pretty much all I hold dear, and live alone happier than I could have imagined, supporting myself in a full-time job where I have only ever presented as a woman – is because my body developed with male attributes while my brain didn’t.

Frustrating. People aren’t always as clear as I am, and some transition partially, retreat, reconsider, transition again, have doubts, cling onto things they feel more important, and maybe never decide to physically transition. But they do this after many years, not just after a short while. And so the conversation online today has gone over the value of what is called the ‘real life test’ or more accurately now, ‘real life experience’ (RLE). Basically it means you prove, through witnesses like employment, and people who can vouch for you, that you have lived exclusively in a gender not assigned at your birth, for two whole years.

Unsupported

And it is a dangerous frustration. For a mental health approach, insisting on persisting with the cause of all the distress, indeed placing it all under some unreasonable pressure and risk, hardly seems conducive to good mental health. Why? Because people like me seek out medications before they are available on prescription. Losing hair matters when you are older, and entering puberty matters when you are young. These things are irreversible. Nowadays, young people can have their puberty arrested. But no-one is going to give me anti-androgens while my hair recedes. But also because we have to go many months without seeing anyone at all, during which time we are given the task of unsupported RLE. I was asked today if I would like help with my voice. Of course I bloody would! ‘Sir’ on the phone is immensely hurtful, especially when you have to explain. And yet you can’t even get voice therapy until the third psychiatrist has approved your status as genuinely being the gender you are already living in, for one year.

OK; so you pay for your own laser, electrolysis, prosthetics, wigs, voice therapy, counselling, hormones (this is not a personal endorsement of the practice, just that so many feel compelled to) etc. and do your best, while your world is collapsing around you – and call it real life experience. I suppose if you get through that, you get through anything. But not everyone is as strong or resilient as I am, and I wonder how many ‘fail’, suffer or perhaps die along they way because it becomes too much. I am not alone in finding that I may well be able to obtain my Gender Recognition Certificate and change my birth certificate gender, before I can complete surgery to correct things.

I do understand that for some, being given time and space is important for self-understanding. Let’s not rush anything; maybe you aren’t completely sure, or able to be. But some of us really are. Waiting for treatment is wasted treatment time.

Is this the best way for the health professionals to make sure they aren’t sued for passing anyone for surgery who isn’t prepared to sign an indemnity instead? Yes, I would sign in blood that I would rather die as a woman within a year, than have to live ever again, and for however long, as a healthy man.

Why?

Real Life Experience

Real?

Could it be anything other than Life?

Is life ever either not real or not experienced?

Do we ever experience anything other than real life?

I have been tested. For around 40 years I did not know what was wrong, why I was an outsider among men, why I wanted what I hated myself for. That was real. Very real, and very uncomfortably real. At times it tore me apart inside, it was that real. And it was life, and it was my experience. Ultimately, I failed at ‘living as a man’.

For around 18 months I tried to live a dual gendered life. To hang onto the person I loved most in all the world, to a partnership I valued above anything else, to a shared life that was safe and mutually supportive. I tried. It was life, and it was my experience, and again, ultimately, I failed. That’s two tests, thoroughly lived and experienced that could have destroyed me. What else can I try? Supposing as a woman I fail again. What else could I be, without losing reality, losing life and therefore ending experience?

This is not Real Life Experience for me. This is what happens when all the tests are already done and over. I failed at all the other options, whereas this one has given me a sense of reality, of living, that I never knew I was allowed to experience. I know what I need to complete this picture, and that knowledge gets harder to live with, without resolution, each day. And yet, without any support, I must continue, waiting for appointments for opinions, for treatment, whilst doing my best to convince the world that I am not forever in a transition, but really what I say I am.

There is nothing else. That’s what makes me so … Charing Cross!

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Order, disorder, out of order

  • Posted on December 7, 2012 at 11:41 pm

Order and disorder are at the heart of gender perception. Putting things in order, arranging them in a logical or predictable way, means tidiness and ease of retrieval. Something is there when you want to find it, and when you are looking in the right place you don’t find something unexpected instead.

Order

Order is the way we don’t lose things. But if ever you have worked with databases (and I suppose if you haven’t, even a book with an index is a database) you come to realise that a table of contents isn’t enough. Order is complex, and most real-life databases are relational: in other words there are different kinds of relationships involved in their ordering, because there are different reasons for finding the same thing, and sometimes several things possibly meet the initial requirement. These relationships are: one-to-one – my cat is Suki, Suki is my cat. One-to-many – my Suki is a black cat, not all black cats are my Suki. Many-to-many – there are lots of cats called Tiddles, of all colours. Being too simple can be complicated: where shall I keep this key? With all keys in a key drawer? Or in a jar near where it is used? Or in my pocket because then it is always where it is needed? Or in the door, because security isn’t an issue and it saves time? What I want is for the key to be in all places (associated with keys in general, associated with the particular door, on my person in case I am outside), and that is why there are so many ‘see also’s in book indexes.

We are often very simplistic in ordering people too, according to our own need. This is the reason for racial segregation, for sex discrimination, why we stick to a particular religion, and why we have nationalist terrorists. It’s all about simple right order. Oh, and it’s why we name disorders, so they too become ordered. We love order, we need order, and we do so hate order to change – it is so disorienting.

Even I like order, and prefer it to disorder, but it does mean putting me in the ‘wrong’ place, compared with where I used to be, and that confuses. Where is that key? I’ve always kept it in the jar, and it’s not there! And yet when you find it, it is the right key, it is the same key. Someone may have borrowed it, put a useful coloured tab or keyring on it, it may have got rusty, but it still works. Where it is, how it is described or tagged, matters a whole lot less than what it is. It just helped you feel sure where to find it in the simplest possible way.

Unless you order your keys by coloured tabs, rather than the doors they open, that is. And I do so hate yellow tabs, they don’t go with anything I wear.

Disorder

I have a disorder, it seems. Officially it used to be called gender identity disorder, now gender dysphoria. But it has to be a disorder so that an orderly diagnosis can be written down, and so that in many parts of the world, insurance funding for the right medical support can be given. It must be one of the few disorders that is diagnosed as psychological and put in order solely by physiological intervention. So we cannot even properly locate the disorder.

My disorder means that my 56-year history of being here was described in some respects in the wrong way. I have always been dropped in the male jar, with male keys, and now I live in a prettier box, some people mislay me. It might be a pronoun mistake, it might be a deliberate misuse of the name I used to have, and which is legally no longer mine. Or it might be that I am staring them in the face but, because I am in the wrong order, they cannot see me – or that I am in a place they would rather not look because of what they think I am associated with! Order is actually as much what we are accustomed to and like, as what is right or best. Don’t we all keep something in a quite illogical place but never lose it? I don’t really have a disorder at all. In fact I am very ordered; I just place myself in order (the best I can find) according to my preference, not yours.

And this is why people who are differently-gendered generally do not like the term ‘disorder’.

Loss of order

The worst thing that can happen in the orderedness of a relational database (where one tag can belong to many things) is not that a tag gets lost, but that it gets confused with another and things become insufficiently distinguished and separable. How do you know, if you start retagging and reclassifying from scratch, that you are putting the order back the way it was? I am not about to say that order does not matter, only that our gender tags are in many-to-many relations, and that ideas of gender order and disorder are not as simple as we have come to like. But we are so afraid of losing that unique tag, and the whole thing falling apart! It is a very conditioning fear too.

We are all in a conditioned place, where I am incredibly comfortable with myself in a way I never was, but where things are a bit awkward when people think I am still disordered (see De Facto, Defect or Defector). And because others are conditioned too, it does not matter to some that the key still fits the lock. The tag is the wrong colour. And the consequence of that is that I am not in the jar any more, and if I am in the pretty box, it is better not to use me.

Official order out of order

This month has seen more furore over the American Psychiatric Associations’s ‘bible’, the revised fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Love of, and some necessity of, order has led to a limited amount of reorganisation of gender identity disorder (GID) into gender dysphoria, and removing it from the section on sexual disorders. But imagine you are born with a dysfunctional limb and you are defined and diagnosed as having a psycho-appendicular disorder? And instead of being sent to a bone specialist you are sent to a psychiatrist? That’s what my sense of gender is like: I do not have a mental disorder. I have a problem with the way my body developed.

Next week I visit a gender identity clinic for the first time. It has taken an inordinately long time to get to this first appointment, and my body has been changing nicely in the meantime, and I have retreated a long way from the edge of the big black inviting pit my mind was sometimes dragged towards. I am OK now, thank you, and I like the way my body is responding. I am very ordered. The clinic? Part of a Mental Health trust. My appointment? With a psychiatrist.

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With my body

  • Posted on October 20, 2012 at 8:33 am

She was infatuated; in love. He adored her. Life was out of this world: made in heaven. They loved, they played, they rolled, they eventually decided. One day, as he was filing her birth certificate, it hit him. This was not her 25th birthday coming up. It was her 23rd, eight years since they first ….

 

They met at a ball. It was a charity do for people who had missing pasts. Children placed in care, often with troubled childhoods, so they had a lot in common. But something, just something, drew them together and they instantly connected. Cautiously, over years, they began to trust, learned to be vulnerable again. Their love was deep, if watchful, so some years later they decided to marry, and work together in the meantime to find their families, or at least their mothers. What a coincidence in the end that they had the same maternal surname. Even born within a year of each other in the same town. The same street.

 

She stared out of the window on an incongruously bright and calm morning. Hints had become games, games had become serious. Not the sex in woods, on hilltops, the lounge floor, at the kitchen sink, to which she had not merely consented but colluded. No. This morning he had gone to work after the most awful weekend. She reckoned up five thousand, maybe more – times they had had sex together. And now he had gone right over the edge and told her that there was no other description for it. He was, in truth, a woman. Wrong body. Same heart and soul, but wrong body. And he, she, was going to start putting it right. What had he known? What might she have known or guessed, in what he asked for, the way he was? Except that if she had known, five thousand time she would not have given her consent.

 

With my body, I honour you

The simplest and most heartfelt of the marriage promises. Right at the centre of nurture, commitment and fidelity. I think I did. In fact I think I did it well, and having heard how others have fared, often better than most. I was honourable in all my loving and cherishing all through, all the way to the very last time. But like the other two stories, it raises the question, not altogether philosophical, of legality. How should each story end? With under-age sex? With incest? With rape?

‘If I had known …’ Of course. And the verdict at this point with each may very well be that, between the consenting parties, no further action need be taken about the past. They are not so different, especially if I am so certain about what I am. But what of the present? How many times was the infringement done? When did one party knowingly act illegally? Is it for any third party to bring charges? A parent? A keen lawyer? And if one party were to be famous, perhaps a journalist should uncover it – in the public interest, of course.

What a dawning realisation it was to me. It’s OK, I have gone through the no-blame bit of counselling, I’ve explained that for 40 years I simply did not know how to describe or understand myself, and until rather late in the day I could always demonstrate doubt, or at least plead duality. But in the case of all three stories, you cannot unknow the truth. ‘If I had known, I would not have consented.’

With my body, I dishonour you

The new truth is that as a woman, everything I feel, desire, do as I always did, thousands of times, had switched instantly from honour (even the old word, worship) to defilement. The welcome of what I offered from my heart, the expression of my soul, the ultimate vulnerability shared, the desire – had become repugnant. I understand. Of course I do (and haven’t I a hundred times mentally switched the roles to imagine how I would feel?) and of course I must, because in the end, if it isn’t my fault, it is my cause.

When you are the one turned off, repelled, when your love evaporates in a moment, when you realise and shrink from ever doing again what you once did so urgently, the decision is very straightforward and unequivocal, and you can never again imagine the awfulness of repeating it with the new knowledge.

When you are the one against whom those gates slam, and through which you can still see, it is altogether different, and I cannot expect anyone to know how it feels.

Don’t misunderstand; I do not blame. I just still stand, somewhat bewildered, because all my intent, always, was honourable. It just became inappropriate. It was just wrong. And this is my problem; not guilt, not being let off the hook, but still being the same person: same heart and soul, same eyes and hands, same love and kindness, same need to give.

And I just can’t imagine how life can ever be the same again with this new knowledge. My birth certificate isn’t right. I was born in the same street to the same mother. And I always made love in my heart as a woman. And I want to be made honourable again.

 

In poetry: Losing my touch.

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