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Who do people say that I am?

  • Posted on October 13, 2012 at 8:07 am

These are not moments of doubt, but such utter self-conviction it matters that it is shared. But can anyone else really understand who I am?

I work in an office of men, so sometimes the conversation is jokeily blokeily. It isn’t offensive, though sometimes a bit close to that edge. Would they really say those things if the majority present were senior women? I find myself reacting not differently (I always hated the way men talk often about women), but more overtly. And it leaves me wondering if I am accepted as being ‘the woman who is really a man’. So it’s OK; she will understand, and maybe join in. She’s been there, she’s not sensitive like real women.

Sorry guys. I am not one of you, and my relief at not being one of you is profound. It is a thankfulness that I cannot describe. I haven’t become misandrist, and I don’t see you as misogynist. No, you are just still in the mindset ‘male as default’ – the obvious supremacy of the male. Women are just like that. Men are just like that. Aren’t they?

I don’t feel humoured, I just know there is a point where people give up following you. For all the courage they say I have to be different (do I have a choice?), or to set an example in going for what is true to myself against all odds, I feel that they will always say: ‘Andie? Yes she’s the transsexual. Used to be a man.’ Not a real woman. Not really who I say I am.

The same happens when people talk about relationships and love. There are those who expect me to seek romance with another trans* person – well it would just be easier, wouldn’t it? And aren’t you being a bit transphobic if you say you wouldn’t? Or those who have said I shall always be ‘somewhere in the middle’. And I try to reply that I am not part of some community that lives together out of a sense of shared identity or for self-preservation; that I am normal, that I am a woman, just one with a different history.

The more I follow my truth, the more my past dissolves. I had a recurrent dream the other night, only this time I was playing the same part as a woman. Even when I have shaken off consciousness, I no longer perceive myself as a man. What could be more lovely?

And yet I still feel, when other people relax their thinking, they do not do the same. They are really very good indeed with pronouns, the acceptance, the inclusion – mostly. And yet am I really ‘one of the girls’ to the women around me? Or still, underneath, ‘one of the men’? Or just an honorary guest for both?

What will it take, I wonder, for people to look at me and see who I am, not as something changed, but as the essential, genuine, whole me? To go beyond their rationalisation of what I have gone through, and not to need a rationalisation at all, just to be seen as who I am.

I have elsewhere remarked this week a shared observation amongst trans friends: that social transition (the whole-life leaving behind of a gender identity you were given) increases your gender dysphoria rather than relieving it. At one level you are doing everything you can and feeling a fulfilment you could never have imagined. You don’t even feel certain parts of your body any more for most of the time, and other parts you become very much more aware of. And then you catch yourself in a mirror undressed and know something is still dreadfully wrong, and can do nothing.

The people I am waiting for at a gender clinic see people like me every day. We are physiological males or females wanting surgery to change that. They see us, they go home, they have lives to live. I don’t think they can imagine what it is like as months and years go by, to feel worse each day we present and live more confidently. Outwardly they see a success; a ‘real life experience’ going well, following the pathway. There are too many of us to cope with, and anyway, we aren’t ill are we, so what are we complaining about? But inside I am thinking: every day you go home, and my referral forms lie yet another day in your intray, waiting for someone to transfer paper to computer, computer to diary, just to let me know the day you will begin to talk to me – a bit of me is screaming louder just to be heard. For who I am.

Who do you say that I am?

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Learning and forgetting

  • Posted on October 7, 2012 at 10:17 am

I love my new flat. It’s bright, it has a feeling of space about it, and apart from one ochre wall behind me, is mercifully tolerant of all my colours. Already it feels like home, a few friends have been round, and I’ve made it my own. At the same time all the most useful small boxes for books have gone to my storage cupboard ready for the next move. I have no idea how long I shall be here, but if they offered to sell, I’d stay.

I have peace, I have colour, and I have a home that feels like it only has female presence to it. I love it.

This is where the learning starts. I am finding out all sorts of things, like where I put things after arriving, why have I still not found the teaspoons, did I really not buy mushrooms?? Until my brain maps onto this new way of living, there aren’t the right places to keep certain things! I’m learning all the trivial things too, like the smoke alarm is easily triggered long before anything burns, and doesn’t appear to have a reset button. Or like when the bins are emptied, because nobody here seems to flatten their recycling. And thirty steps up means it’s better to use bags than crates at the supermarket!

I am also learning that partnership, whilst it has a bit to do with sexuality, is a lot more to do with helping each other out, and, in my case, being told to sensibly stop, rather than carrying on until very late at night, just because stuff needs doing. And that it might feel more finished to end up cooking at 10 pm, but 8pm is better for the digestion. Partnership is about parallelism, working alongside. Single is serial. However good I am at multitasking, it’s threading tasks in turn, not actually being able to do twice as many things in the same time. It isn’t actually a good idea to use an electric hob whilst building shelves!

I’m also learning that many friends are families and partnered, most are easily as busy as I am with other things, and that when you most need a hug, it just isn’t there. A snog? Forget it. So one thing I still haven’t learned is where on my shelves to place The Art of Loving. I left all the sex books behind, because I think I can still do all that pretty well (if ever I get the chance again) and wouldn’t learn any more from reading (if I ever did). But loving? There must be something I didn’t quite get right there.

Emma Cantons has just published her book If You Really Loved Me about her life with Victoria, who has finally gone through her gender reassignment surgery this week. I am also about to publish with Bramley Press, Laura Newman’s A Love Less Ordinary, which questions and answers the roots of love, the possibilities, and about finding yourself, your real self, and knowing that you have made the choice to be authentic (and that’s Laura, not her trans* partner Nicci!). Each is a life story about partnering and staying with a trans* lover. Special stories maybe, but not unique. A special love certainly, where sexuality is questioned, where love exceeds the power of norms, and where a realisation that something about the other is greater than the personal challenge.

The art of loving has been very close to my heart for a very long time, and I am faced with it by these new books. They are such an antidote to all the others that tell you relationships cannot survive, or that relate appalling accounts of rejection, violence and hate when a married person responds to their trans* identity and gives up fighting against themselves. But there is a message that is really important to all partners and family members of trans* people:

“If a trans partner or family member is prepared to face all the challenges of being trans* in a cis world in order to be authentic, how much am I prepared to discover myself by stripping away my own conditioning of who I am and how I fit in the world?”

Recognising and responding to your innate gender identity, with all the challenges, pain, expense, loss, all of which are huge in themselves, is one of the toughest things you might ever have to face. People look at me, how I am, how positive, happy, outgoing, how supremely confident about my gender I am, and they express a deep respect. But I wonder how they might re-examine any aspect of their own lives and respond to any truth they might find. We think we know who we are because we fit. What if something you’ve taken for granted all your life as the way to be, to relate, to express yourself, even the way you understand love, were, on closer inspection, found to be more about societal expectations than about your true potential? Would you dare, as trans* people do, to undergo a radical reassessment, and in front of all the world, be different?

I still haven’t worked out where to put The Art of Loving so I don’t lose it, but I do know I still have a lot to learn. I have moved on, and whenever I find someone to learn with again, I hope that we shall both be incredibly daring.

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Happiness

  • Posted on September 30, 2012 at 8:09 am

Last Friday evening I spent a lovely time with Laura Newman, whose new book A Love Less Ordinary will very soon be published with Bramley Press. It was the first time we met, after numerous emails getting the book arranged, designed and processed, and was a wonderful getting-to-know. But perhaps what I shall remember most is that once more, someone who didn’t begin this journey with me, who sees it from the outside, sees someone very positive and very happy, who has turned their life around in what is really a very short time. For me, it has been intense at times, as scary as a narrow bridge over a canyon, without the other side in sight. And it seems like ages. It was very affirming to meet Laura, and I am looking forward to meeting her and Nicci before too long.

Yesterday I went for my monthly back-rescue. Deep tissue massage includes elbows! It isn’t fun exactly, and I probably undid a lot of good by playing the trumpet all afternoon and evening. I can’t remember how many years I’ve been going, but it is a special relationship when you repeatedly allow someone to do that to you – and still feel grateful! It is also the one place where I have taken my changes, to be seen and talked over, and found complete acceptance as I’ve explained myself a little more each time. Of course, as so often, I’m not the only trans person she has known, but I could also have been met with a certain distance and caution, and I wasn’t. The reason I mention yesterday is that somehow we just fell into talking as two women together, and I no longer felt ‘trans’.

It’s been like that recently – falling onto conversation as a woman with another woman, almost as if they haven’t noticed, or if they do it counts for nothing. And I realised, as I joined the orchestra later for the rest of the day, that this was another first, in playing for them as a woman. It’s an ad hoc orchestra, and many people do know me, but not all. By now, when these firsts happen, I don’t really think about it, because it is actually quite difficult to remember how I used to be. It is so far removed, that the nice man on the trumpet is like someone else I vaguely used to remember. I remember concerts I played, because it was me alright, and it was fun, but it’s the me bit, not the presentation of self, that I recall. All sorts of people I don’t know came up to me afterwards to complement my playing, so I know that being the slightly-different-looking woman simply doesn’t get in the way any more.

So in a way this is a point of arrival, like when you are on board and the ship is under way. There is a separation, an excitement, all the big efforts to get here now taken over by a vessel with a purpose and a known destination.

And all this in the same weekend as I prepared finally to leave the person I have loved most for so very long, and still do. So why have I titled this blog ‘Happiness’?

All these touches of knowing self, of being recognised at last being as I should always have been, of a sense of the deepest integrity, of falling completely into place, leave me feeling more happy with myself, in my deepest sense of self, than I have ever been my whole life. It is very hard to express, or find adequate words, because unless you have been there, it’s as if the words don’t exist. It is a happiness so powerful that nothing is strong enough to put me back anywhere else. I face years of frustration getting my body properly adjusted, and every day it feels more and more inappropriate in certain respects. As my breasts begin to develop it feels like the restoration of a missing part of me. Like when a valuable jar has stood for many years and been admired, then finally the original lid turns up and is reunited.

This is just so completely right.

Losing love simply tears me apart, but at the same time I know this happiness. Such an irony; back to the paradoxes in many of my blog posts. But how can I explain?

I wanted to write this for all those trans* people in a similar position, for whom it is so incredibly hard to arrive at self because of the associated loss. For all those people who, unlike Nicci with her Laura and their love less ordinary, must lose love, lose family, and go alone. I want to say that the happiness of finding your self, maybe finding your soul, really does outweigh all else, and that it is yours, if you want it. Nothing in this world is worth hanging onto if it keeps you from this kind of happiness, and you will find the resources to see you through the worst of the loss, the most difficult of times, the feelings of distrust or hatred from a few, and the insecurity of a place you’ve never been before. You will find true friends, you will find acceptance and understanding, and you can hope, with me, that you will find love that is as deep and as shared and as committed as you will ever need.

And in case anyone accuses you of selfishness, look back on my earlier musings: Selfish. Self(ish). Self.

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Acceptably different

  • Posted on August 4, 2012 at 7:28 pm

It’s a conversation that will never end: if society has one standard and we don’t fit, and the standard doesn’t look like changing any time soon, what should we do? The choice is varied and individual, but the opinions collide when they are too strong. Those of us with a conviction that something was horribly wrong with our bodies almost from birth, have no need of a description other than of their innately-felt gender. Only one thing matters: correction. Being trans* is transitory. It ends. At the other end of the spectrum, those who appreciate and enjoy fluidity love to occupy and even celebrate being of mixed or ambiguous gender (or none).

And everything in between. For many the saying applies that transition never ends. It does mean that our relationships with cisgender or gender-binary social attitudes can be very different. Yet the one thing that probably occupies all of us along this spectrum, is the need to live within society with freedom of expression and acceptance as we are.

Ay, there’s the rub (as Hamlet said, thinking about uncertain dreams).

When celebrants of overt diversity are taken as icons of transness, those who wish to disappear into their singular (binary) gender identity (called going stealth) can find it hard. Whilst one will dance in a club and shout ‘I’m a tranny!’, reclaiming abuse as empowerment, the other lives in fear of some slight giveaway in their otherwise complete physical transition ‘outing’ them. I am more on the border, lucky enough to blend like camouflage except under closer inspection, happy enough to explain my position, and just seeking acceptance as always a bit different.

For me, cisgenderism (ie, insistence on the binary) is simply not good enough. The sheer numbers of us who do not fit, whatever our response, are overwhelming. A proportion of us are transsexual, meaning we have a sense of the binary and a definite preference that we feel we must attain, but that doesn’t mean we don’t recognise others are most definitely non-binary. I have no idea how many trans* people of all kinds I am nominally connected to thanks to the Internet, but it must run into many thousands around the world, even if we only count friends of friends, and there is a huge diversity.

Male and Female are as meaningless as the bodily humours in mediaeval medicine. They once sort of helped describe most animals at a very broad level, but I suppose it was also long before gender-changing creatures were discovered to be so. Nonetheless, cultures developed around the world that understood and held in esteem, those who were neither male nor female in some sense. And I cannot say this loud enough, in our culture that has forgotten this: the gender binary concept is false.

For me, though, it is still firmly in place. I have to accept that for the majority of people I am different. Two things have been on my mind in the past days and weeks: who notices and who cares? Whenever we see something that stands out a bit, we want to know why, so we can get it back into order in our minds. Today I was walking in busy streets and just felt noticed a bit more than usual. I don’t think the lack of mascara was the only reason, and maybe it really was only me, but when a couple walking by simultaneously look at you and hold their gaze a tad too long, you sort of know they spotted something not quite right. Does it bother me? No, not a lot, I just wish it never happened.

The other situation was potentially a lot more tricky. A new job. Suddenly I am under close scrutiny by the same people from 9 to 5 every day. And no, the voice does not hold up too well. I don’t think husky meant sexy! As it happens I have been incredibly well received. I know they know, of course. They know I know that too, etc. And I feel … well, normal. I am just me, and all my old skills, experience and knowledge are being used again, and I am just working. I know that some questions have been asked, and they have been formally answered, and I have had no sideways glances in my presence. It is lovely just to get on and do what I do, officially female, discernibly transsexual, but at work and earning my keep, hoping I don’t get asked about family things like marital status.

I got called ‘he’ twice this week. And I haven’t even worn trousers once. I put it down to fitting in with the blokes because my experience lies in understanding technology like they do, thinking about it like they do, explaining it as they do. Who else would discuss these things that way? ‘He’ does. Maybe she is not a proper woman after all. But accepted nonetheless.

As time goes on, I will recognise that they know I know they know about me, and I will freely correct them without feeling I am outing myself and needing to explain in more detail. But I shouldn’t have to. Being trans should already be so normal, because the gender binary is so patently incorrect, that it is OK to be unequivocally trans with whatever identity I choose to live with.

And so I accept my being different, I call it normal, and I recognise that some people do not get it. And this is why I feel so let down by the UK’s wonderful NHS. By the time I am prescribed hormones I shall be well on the way to being able to apply for my gender recognition certificate (GRC) simply by virtue of having got on and lived as a woman for long enough. Thank goodness for the Internet! These protracted periods of being unsupported, delayed, forced to live with a physiology that feels all wrong, may be called ‘real life experience’ by clinicians, but believe me, once you have committed yourself in society as ‘acceptably different’ you will know if there are any doubts, and every day you are forced not to progress is not ‘real’ at all, it is damaging. If you can’t get the hormones, if you can’t afford laser or electrolysis treatment, you can be unacceptably different for much too long.

It isn’t all grouse though. I want to thank the lovely people at work who have included me, by complimenting me on my dress, or my necklace, or my nails, and by sending me emails on doing my nails a different way, or where they get their favourite cosmetics. That all means I can live with this painfully slow journey into being as little different as possible.

(Just don’t call me ‘he’!)

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Just being

  • Posted on July 22, 2012 at 9:11 am

Fifty years ago I was just being me. I was too small to know there were choices and comparisons to be made. I stirred cakes and I helped mix cement, I pushed a straw-filled polar bear (this is before really cuddly toys!) and a bulldozer equally around the floor.

Forty years ago I was wondering why I was different, an outsider unable to break in. I was a teenager, and I guess a lot of teenagers have very mixed-up periods in their lives where finding their identity is based on culture, friends, media and family. Few are free enough to see things as they really are. I had long hair, a bright pink shirt and purple heather-cord trousers. And a lot of feelings and wishing about myself that I couldn’t tell anyone.

Thirty years ago I was in love, and in public ceremony, made commitments that I’d felt for a long time. I had found someone who made me feel alive and brave enough to be vulnerable with; someone who I didn’t feel so much an outsider with.

Twenty years ago we had children pushing cuddly toys and bulldozers around, and we were still making cakes and mixing cement. But I wasn’t the one making cakes; we had a well-organised division of labour that worked well. It was a sensible layer of complementarity and partnership.

Ten years ago I was starting to feel an outsider again. Maybe I mean an insider; inside I was wanting to just be me. The children were at a stage of not running up to me when I got home and my role was changing, and calling me to find myself again. ‘Being me’ meant art classes, then returning to music. The role was doing beautiful things and expressing myself, without a role or expectations. And I really began to come face to face again with feelings from forty years ago.

This year I came to terms with my decades, and with what it means to be myself, instinctively, in terms of how I live and understand what it means ‘to be’. I am living a normal life again, going to work nine to five, sharing housework, cutting the grass, mending stuff, doing the ironing, playing music in several bands. I don’t feel an outsider any more, but I’m doing all the same things, for all the same reasons and in all the same ways. Living, loving, doing, being.

This week I shall remember the decades, especially the thirty-year anniversary. I was a commitment I made for a reason I still hold. I didn’t make vows because I felt any absolute divine obligation, but because it was what I wanted, wholeheartedly to do. That was as close to being me as I felt about anything at the time. I still have the same heart, the same soul, and it feels no different. Am I not the same person? I shall leave that question open, because I read many discussions, and most are based on semantics of ‘person’ – does that mean the heart and soul, or the perceived human being shaped by roles, obligations, moods and emotions? I can’t answer that any better than you can, because we use words to mean what we mean, not what words inherently mean.

But thirty years ago there were two people, the same two as today, for all the external and experiential changes. Unfortunately one of them had gender dysphoria, and it had to be resolved. That has meant a revisit to love and commitment, and the basis for that. And on the anniversary day I shall bite my lip, go to work and live a normal day, because I can be nothing else than who I am, and nothing else would be better.

Sometimes, it is enough just to beSometimes, it is enough just to be.

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