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Rachael’s Café

  • Posted on May 18, 2012 at 11:22 am

Rachael and LucyThis is Rachael Jones (R) with Lucy Danser (L). Both are amazing. Rachael has a caf&#233 in Bloomington, Indiana, where Lucy, an actress and writer, met her. The result of the meeting at the real, original Rachael’s Café, was Lucy’s first play: Rachael’s Café. From Edinburgh to Dublin and then Brighton, it has run as a fringe theatre event to tremendous reviews. This play deserves to fall off the fringe onto the mainstream stage and go big. My review is based on the performance at the Marlborough Theatre in Brighton, 17 May 2012.

The story

Eric Wininger is in his 40s, divorced and with three children. His career has been as a printer ink salesman to some pretty important places, but there is no death of a salesman here. Inside, underneath, all his life, Eric has known that the person she should live as is Rachael. This is how we meet her, in a very ordinary post-salesman setting; a lovely, warm person tidying up the café she has struggled to establish as a place to be herself and express her own sense of inclusivity. All her regulars know and love her and she is completely at home. Now she is clearing up and reflecting on her day, and her life, without sentimentality but with great and grateful honesty. ‘You can’t have it all’ might be the close, as she deals with the conflict of being herself, wanting acceptance as herself, and finding that even now she can’t keep everyone happy.

Rachael has dreams, she knows who she is, and she accepts the enormity of being different. But it makes sense to her. We might expect to see her cry (she gets close once) but she knows she fares better than many, and can still see the humour in living with others’ bigotry. Being a woman is simply part of life. There are tensions and frustrations, compromises that we know are not going to be made forever, but no raging against the cruel world, no bitterness.

For anyone relatively unaware of what being transgender means, this ordinariness, this ability to see things as they are without great angst, without reference to sex, without the remotest tinge of the bizarre, is probably the greatest strength of this play.

The performance

Graham Elwell has to be commended for his performance. The smile! The eyes! Even the impeccable soft American accent. The timing, the expression, the mood and the tone, all carried perfectly. It was a flawless performance with immense feeling by someone who even as an actor still feels terribly awkward in heels and a short skirt. Holding an audience with a brief life story for an hour in a single room with few props other than a pink broom is an impressive thing to do so well. Put five stars on his CV for this, because Graham is most definitely not Rachael, but has captured her so well. It was almost a shock, certainly a disappointment, to see Eric emerge without resentment but perhaps some resignation, at the end. And yes, Graham had learned how to put socks on over stockings and still tied a tie badly.

The play

If this is Lucy Danser’s first play, we have a lot to look forward to. As in the photo, she makes Rachael seem a quiet giant. The play evokes huge empathy, informs without being didactic, explores without making you uncomfortable, explains without argument. It is revealing in a way that no-one can come away ever seeing Rachael as other than simply a lovely person whose café is the nicest place to spend time over a hot tea or a home-cooked lunch.

It is dangerous territory. 500 metres down the road last night a massive tent continued the annual visit of the Ladyboys of Bankok, and in anywhere as diverse as Brighton, you might expect to see rather loud drag queens on a Saturday night. So what might you expect, during Festival week, from a play about – what? – a transvestite (you might think)? Writing a play that hits the mark for both cis- and trans-gender people (though maybe not for those who only cross-dress for fun or fetish) is no mean feat. The big worry is that somewhere in the performance you know you are going to squirm or cringe, that the wrong words are going to be used, that a cheap jibe will be made, that suddenly the audience might notice you there, and that maybe you and Rachael have something in common.

Perhaps I am biased, because this play also wrote a large part of my life. It touched many of the places I have been, and did it all with respect and understanding. It is not a plea against transphobia, it hardly references it, but it dissolves it. It doesn’t mean it is a safe play, but it is authentic, it is honest, and I for one hope it reaches the West End one day, that it is filmed, and shows tens of thousands more people that Rachael lives all around them, every day, getting on with life and simply being real – maybe more real than they.

Credits

Lucy, Graham, Rachel: thank you all. And Alex Drummond too, who advised and assisted personally and through the book Grrl Alex: A personal journey to a transgender identity, and without whom I might never have known this wonderful play.

And of course to Lucy’s whole entourage who have enabled this success.

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A lurking fear … of what?

  • Posted on May 14, 2012 at 9:46 am

Disclaimer. I would like this post to be read as a question mark rather than just a personal statement, and certainly not as a personal challenge to anyone, because it is important to so many people who undergo gender transition as part of a family. It is not a statement of right or wrong, it is an exploration.

So, I come out as transgender.

‘No! For goodness sake, I’m not gay!’

By which I mean, really, please understand that this is about gender, not sexual orientation. It’s about what I am, and it doesn’t change what I do. Am I so assertive only because it confuses things? I like to think so.

‘Well, are you a lesbian then?!’

Er, yes, I think that’s a good description, but I prefer the adjective to the noun.

The funny thing is, gender dysphoria still makes you question your orientation, how it might change, and compare it with people you’ve never really had to identify with before. Suddenly, instead of being a hetero male, I’m in another minority that might not wholeheartedly welcome my membership! I’m OK with that, actually, but it does something to other people. Being associated with me, then, does two things to other people. ‘I have a friend/husband/father/colleague who is a trans lesbian woman!’ Fame – or complication. So what does that make you? I am the daughter/friend/wife/colleague of … Oh dear. You didn’t ask for that, did you? And I am sorry – neither did I.

This thought-piece is not about what has been lost. We all lose something when gender comes into question, because we hung a lot of washing on that line. This is about what is not lost. This is about the person who has the gender dysphoria, who always had it but mostly hidden. And mine isn’t hidden any more.

It’s about that thought: Oh my goodness! What do I make you?

I would like to question whether I make you anything at all, other than someone who understand, loves, cares, empathises, stands by and so on. You are only what you willingly make yourself.

Homophobia

Alex Drummond, in her book Grrl Alex, recounts a conference speaker asking if members of the audience would be happy to read Gay Times openly on the train. We are not homophobic, are we? Not at all. But there is a hiccup in there for many of us. We describe the feeling as ‘being misunderstood’, not as being homophobic, heaven forbid!

So what is the fear? ‘I don’t dislike it, it’s just not me!’

Is that all? I wonder whether there is a fear, and a secondary fear too. Richard Beard in Becoming Drusilla (recommended reading!) records a sensation of ‘transphobia-phobia’, interpreting his discomfort of being with Dru (in her transitioning phase) in the presence of people who might be less than friendly. Yes, we are afraid of having to show we are unafraid to people who are afraid. People who are afraid, I suggest, that happy LGBT people undermine not just social order, but personal security in being ‘normal’.

‘What if I get too happy being with gay/lesbian/trans people and I feel too comfortable? Does that mean … that I might not be straight??! What will people think of me? What will I think of myself?’

Personally, I think it is vitally important that we come to understand exactly why we have any discomforts. Is it that we feel ‘unselfed’ by misidentification as something other people don’t always like? Or that we become a proxy target? Perhaps those discomforts are nothing more than our insecurities.

What I make you

I hope this isn’t an unfair thought experiment, but try it anyway, and don’t blame me if you don’t altogether like it. It’s about understanding, not about making decisions.

Disclaimer. Again, this is meant for people in relationships everywhere, struggling with this experience. Swap the genders round – it’s the same story.

You are lying in the dark with your lover. Their hand is gentle, and you trust it. The hand treats you with respect and with tenderness. It explores, it reassures, it loves. It feels safe. It feels good. Very good. And it is just as it has happened a thousand, ten thousand, times, catching you in all moods, interpreting you.

You are lying in the dark with your lover … you drift off to sleep, you awake. Their hand is … there, at rest. The sun has risen; you turn. And you see in your lover that something has changed.

Not their love, not their intent or respect. Not their eyes and the look in them when they meet yours. Not their hand. Not their tender kiss; not their tongue. These are all the same.

Your lover, you know (you may not see), has changed their gender.

This, you realise, is the hand of a woman. These are the eyes of a woman, the kiss and tongue of a woman. And their hand is … there. As it has thousands of times before. Respecting, loving, even worshiping … you.

What does this make you? Why does it give such discomfort? What is the fear? Do you feel drawn into a strange world from which you’ve always felt safe? And from all those ‘other people like this’ that you are being made to feel one of? Are you just afraid of being misidentified? When you lay there in the dark, before the sun rose, what was in your mind, or either of your hearts? Why was it so important, in this situation, your lover’s gender?

Here we are not looking at the procreative possibilities, they may be long past. No, we are talking about the expression of love. If the touch is not different, nor the intent, the love – what is the fear? What causes the tinge of distaste, and the – well – inappropriateness? What was it you liked, there in the dark? What is it really that you don’t like, in the risen sun?

(I like to end as I began:)

‘No! For goodness sake, I’m not a lesbian!’

By which you mean, really – what?

That accepting what is offered changes your sexual orientation? That it changes what you can and cannot do as an expression of human love? That it changes what you are?

And what is it, that you think changes you? The hand? Or you?

 

I only mean to encourage a deeper probing of why we are so unsettled by gender, and why, I suspect, homophobia (even heterophobia) and transphobia can lurk in every one of us. None of us changes anyone else without them being changed by their own fears and insecurities, not ours. Given how we have all been educated in the meaning of gender, it is quite understandable. And it is strong; strong enough to block the love intended or given in intimate spaces, often over many years. But that does not make it the only possible response, when we allow ourselves to reinterpret gender for a better fit. For all of us, it’s not about trying harder, it’s about letting go.

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Knowing what you are and knowing what you are not

  • Posted on May 9, 2012 at 2:28 pm

There is no straight test that determines where a person lies on the gender spectrum. The only person who might give you a genuine idea of their gender position is they themselves. You really cannot examine anyone and make that conclusion without asking them. And they may not tell you the truth, they may be afraid of the truth, they may not even know what gender truth means. Or they may tell you their truth and you don’t believe them.

Despite what we were all taught in school, gender is not a simple binary thing, and that has been said so many times, and is known by clinical gender specialists and psychologists, that you would think we would have given up on it long ago. But no, it is a huge prop for a society built on gender antagonism and power. While it suits, polarisation enables predictable roles, a sense of social security and normality, but it simply is not a valid descriptor of how we are as human beings. It has become taxonomy for taxonomy’s sake, and it simply will not do.

This morning I was reading yet more on the disquiet around DSM V (the American Psychiatric Association’s definitive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders pathologising everything that is not ‘normal’). Specifically, I was reading how everything gender was being sexualised into a male-dominated heteronormative concept. From the origins of DSM (read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test if you want some idea of the twisted picture of humanity it gives and why), too few individuals have imposed their idea of ‘normal’ and made quite ordinary features of life into mental disorder. I raise this, because theoretical, often entirely hypothetical, observations of others with regard to gender are used with no evidential basis, and assume the observer always to be better qualified than the individual.

Yellow and blue are easy

‘I’m yellow’, says this bit of the rainbow. ‘Leastways, if you look at my middle!’

‘I’m blue’, says another.

Green stays silent, the edge of yellow blending on one side, the edge of blue blending on the other. Then:

‘I’m not red!’ In triumphant realisation, green knows what it is not.

I am no expert, but I have become quite saturated with the discussions and theories and expressions of what gender is, what it means to be a woman or a man, how it is between the ears not the thighs, how it is at least in large part innate, not socialised, and how dysphoria describes a problem with the body not with the mind. Gender identity is not personal identity, it is simply where you feel you are on the spectrum with regards to femaleness and maleness. It does not define you, it simply compares you with others in a relation of proximities.

And it is OK to be turquoise – or lime.

In all the gender conversations I’ve had, I have met more people who know what they are not, than what they are. Green knows it is not red, but cannot so easily say it isn’t a yellowy green or a bluey green, and give either a name.

This, I think in large part, is where a sense of dysphoria lies, and where discomfort can persist, whatever steps are made to put gendered physical characteristics right. I know fully transitioned (male to female) people who insist that they are not, and can never be, women in the way they would have been if born and grown up in a different hormone environment. I do not have a female pelvis, and dig me up in 100 years, and an archeologist will tell you that. But they will not know how I identified. (There was the case of the Prague trans internment, about which I wrote this poem – you might reflect or enjoy it.) But what does this mean? That I am never good enough at being what feels most right to me? Who says so? Actually, me. My mind slips back into the binary view, and suddenly I am not good enough.

Every spectrum has two ends, and people live there. I know people who were certain, early enough on to make a real difference to their outcomes, that they live right at one end of the spectrum and quite opposite to their natal physiology. And they have every right to not even identify any longer as transgender (or spectrally misplaced).

But for everyone else who occupies anywhere else that appears at odds with their body’s reproductive bits, it is perfectly OK to be there, and even not to have to talk about it. And it is most OK when we don’t feel we have to justify it to ourselves, understand it, or even describe our gender ‘colour’. In a way it is simply not relevant, providing we are authentic.

Now consider, physiology apart: what are you? Describe how you know you are a man or a woman, or queer, or androgyne. Now do it without referring to what you are not, and without reference to sexual orientation. In other words, without sexualising yourself in terms of preferred activity. Now, without speaking of their body and what they do with it, how might you set a definition of someone else’s gender? Only they can tell you, and they have every right to describe and to present as they feel most authentic. Why does that have to be confusing?

Letting go of paradigms

I try to imagine a world sometimes, where people express themselves, modify or shape or clothe their bodies, simply according to what feels most fitting to them, and where this has nothing to do with any declaration of sexual preference or contribution to the mating game. (After all that’s the easy bit.) Maybe it would be easier for some (no, not all) to live with non-congruence between body and mind. Maybe decisions to adjust physical attributes or not, would be more openly accepted and phobias would evaporate into irrelevance. Maybe we wouldn’t even need to understand how gender dysphoria arises any more than hair colour, because there is no fixing at source. Maybe we could all love trans people for the extra they bring to the party rather than confusion. But that world cannot exist while we maintain any idea of men or women being somehow better than each other, or one defining the rules for the other.

Here’s an exam question for you:

Shania Twain sang Man, I feel like a woman (link with lyrics). Discuss.

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What’s dis for ’ere?

  • Posted on April 6, 2012 at 9:32 am
Even early on in realising that being trans was just the way things were, I never had a problem telling people and trying to explain. For all the rudeness it will never get better unless we also inform.

He wasn’t stupid.
He just misheard in innocence.
I tried to explain my skirt but he stared
at my handbag beside his beer.
What’s dis for, ’ere?
That’s my handbag, I said.
It goes with my gender.
But you’re a bloke, yeah?
Well, yes and no.
(Do I look like one, I mean, really?)
It’s just that when you say man or woman
you leave no space in between.
And that’s where I am.
Yeah, but I could tell,
so why do you do it?
Because it just feels right.
Do you like that t-shirt?
I pointed to the alcoholic brand.
He laughed.
Yeah, that’s why I’m ’ere!
Why am I here?
I sat with him because he jeered.
He wanted friends to know
he was the quick and clever
spotter of trannies on the street.
I could never wear a shirt like that.
Would your girlfriend?
Nah, it’s all flowers and stuff for ’er.
But you wouldn’t mind?
S’pose it would be cool.
And go with her jeans?
Well, yeah, but that’s dif’rent innit?
So we’re all a bit different really
and girls can be boys?
Yeah, but not the other way round,
I mean, it’s, well, girly.
And I don’t feel laddish;
it’s not what’s inside me, so
this is what you see.
Like I said, it’s ‘dys-phor-ia’,
gender dysphoria:
I’m just uncomfortable as a man.
Still don’t understand, mate.
No, he never will.
I take my bag and smile.
Maybe I should have given him a miss.

2011©Andie Davidson

This and other poems on transgender are in my collection from Bramley Press: Realisations.

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Courage

  • Posted on March 25, 2012 at 11:55 am

As so often, several little things come together with a common theme, and invite reflection. This morning Jane Fae had written some comment for the Scottish Sun about her own experience of transphobic violence. Nothing new, and sadly commonplace. Last night Grrl Alex added to her blog ‘Familiarity breeds acceptance’, dealing with transphobia on trains. And yesterday, more fellow musicians told me how brave and courageous I was to come out by addressing the entire band.

All of this speaks of the motivation, the response and the inevitability or the trans life. As Jane said: ‘I’ve got used to a level of violence which, had you said to me this will happen every couple of months, I’d have been horrified.’ I can’t think that anyone would actually choose to be trans in a starkly gender binary society. But we don’t choose to be like this: it really isn’t anything to do with lifestyle. But do we have a choice at all? In a way, most of us have chosen for considerable time: to repress our true nature and live as best we can in the physically-apparent gender. Coming out trans is the result of giving up that choice. Hence what happens to us isn’t altogether avoidable if we want to live normally. So where was the courage? In the life lived-best-but-wrong, going against the current, trying daily to not feel uncomfortable, out of place as an outsider? Or in giving up and then taking whatever is cast at us? At best it is a different kind of courage.

Grrl Alex reflected on dealing with society’s curiosity, not just deliberate transphobia. We can forgive ignorance, but we can give understanding. A trans person on a train is cornered, and it does take courage to travel in a way that leaves you tremendously vulnerable and trapped. Alex’s book relates her own early experiences with trains, and I have had the feeling of surprise in going for a quiet late train, and arriving to find it was football night and packed with striped scarves. Again, no choice. But Alex raises the question of vulnerability and courage. If you act very ‘just leave me alone!’ you can become a target, whereas if you address the ignorant attacker honestly, confident in who you are, you can realise that the problem was really transphobiaphobia (coined perhaps by Richard Beard in Becoming Drusilla, which I recommend). So clearly an active courage can be a great help – so long as you want to be out and visible, and not pretend to be stealth (ie, so convincingly gender binaried that you are indistiguishable from cis-gendered people) when you are not. Alex resolves this by being herself (and I always hesitate at pronouns for Alex) and rather than being brave, is assertive (the blog and cover of the Grrl Alex book speak for themselves).

Which brings us to me. I chose on several occasions this past week, to stand up in front of between 30 and 40 people at a time who have long known me as a man, and effectively say ‘I am a woman’ – with a bit of explanation. For ages I scrubbed off nail varnish, changed my watch, as well as everything else, after a day lived as a woman, just to go and play the trumpet. And I admit there was no courage there. I tired of that, and soon people were noticing – even admiring – my choice of colours, which maybe matched a bracelet also left on. I relaxed. That wasn’t courage, it was just starting to be myself. And anyone who asked, increasingly got a direct reply that I was transgender. Was that courage? No, it was just getting safer to be honest. Compared with the first time I went out as a woman, speaking in public about myself as a woman was almost trivial. So I protest now that I am only doing what I have to do and that, being authentic, it is just being honest. I don’t have a choice, when the alternative is a denial of self.

So why am I so visible? Is it just that I can never be pretty enough to ‘go stealth’? Maybe age is on my side after all! No. I have shared with people around the world what it is like to be trans, and have found so many scared people, in very unforgiving circumstances, or in fear of what they might have to admit to themselves and to partners that, like Grrl Alex, I feel compelled, at least for now, to say ‘It’s OK to be trans. You don’t have to be a 100 per cent man or woman, indistinguishable from cis-gendered folk. This is part of normality and the way the world is.’

So if I show any courage at all, it is because I want to give a little more confidence to people who need it in order to realise themselves. I can’t make life easier for them or for me. This is tough. This can tear your emotions apart like nothing else. But it is OK, whoever in your life can’t cope with it. And it is far, far better than trying to pretend everything is fine in gender-land when it is not.

Courage is what you have when you enter a place, not where safety is not guaranteed, but where you are positively likely to get threatened. These are places we simply must eradicate, but they won’t go until trans people do stand up and be visible, be assertive, write in our newspapers, blog and live normal lives – like people of different races, or gay and lesbian and anything else between increasingly can.

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