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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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Birds of a feather

  • Posted on December 1, 2012 at 6:28 pm

I was very encouraged by the response to last week’s blog about the hope there is for finding what love really is all about, and finding that the foundations are in loving yourself rather than in what the other makes you. Maybe one day I shall find the same. Will positive thinking help? Someone on Facebook posted a link to a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, reviewed in the Guardian a couple of years ago, debunking the power of positive thinking. Does it make things better? Apparently not. And I shall be reminded, possibly chided, by my son who I was exhorting to think positively this week. I did. He doesn’t; but the outcome does look promising.

Personally, I don’t think the positive thinking does any more than I think prayer works, because what matters and makes a difference to me is the willingness to see opportunities to make progress in the direction you want. Positive thought, prayer, meditation are all ways of keeping your eyes open. I imagine it as being in dense jungle, having little sense of direction. You can give up; you may as well close your eyes or blunder about without a clue, going in circles. But if you keep alert, open, then every breath of wind that parts the leaves and reveals the direction of the sun, or the scent of water, or a warning of tigers, is just one little chance more of finding your way safely. You don’t make the difference, you are simply available to it. Right now I am trying to be available rather than closing my eyes. I have this idea, a reassuring idea, that somewhere, someone needs my love and wants to offer their own. Not in exchange, but because it will be the only thing we can do when we find it.

I am reminded to wait until I am ready – until the wind parts the leaves. Only two months ago I asked, for the last time: ‘Is this really the best we can do, after 32 years?’ It seems it was, and it felt very like negative thinking. The power of negative thinking is in closing your eyes, in not seeing possibilities.

Like Birds

And so it is that I came to reflect how so many of my girl friends at the moment are all emerging from lost partnerships, broken romances, or struggling with love/not-love and feeling like – well, like birds with broken wings. And we gather in mutual comfort, have our bit of fun, a night out, or a cry together, and reassure each other. And I sort of know that when any of us finds that love again we may fly off, with the joy we had when last we were loved and wanted.

It isn’t a negative existence though; we joke about the disastrous judgements we have all made, how we misunderstood and were misunderstood, and how dreadfully hard it is to find the ‘right’ partner. The trouble is, the more we establish the selves we settle into, the harder it is to imagine another fitting neatly in the way we need. Remember those compromises when we were teenagers or in our twenties? Yes, we would give up this or that, do something we might not otherwise, all in the cause of securing love, stability, coupledom. How much did we hide, and lose of ourselves, to be safe? Yes, we all did.

Perhaps we will learn that being single birds keeps us together in ways that are just as rewarding. But we all reflect that the comfort of partnership, of knowing there is always one who will love, support and look after you, remains a big gap. I love my broken-winged birds-of-a-feather, I really do. And girls’ nights out are something I have missed out on all my life until now, and it reminds me of how lonely I used to be sometimes, even before I lost my best friend and lifelong partner. So yes, I am thinking positively. Not because it will mend my wing, but so I can keep catching the hints of which direction to head in, and while I do, I have some lovely friends to stay chirpy with. And either my wing will mend, or I shall just have strong legs.

I have been fiddling with a poem on this too. I expect it will get better, but for now it’s like this: Like birds.

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Understanding

  • Posted on November 10, 2012 at 8:26 am

How much can you know how another person is feeling? ‘I’ve been there’ is reassuring, if you believe the person really has, or has been close enough. Sometimes, in a deep, spiritual way, you know you are very close to being understood or to understanding, but as I’ve written elsewhere here, sometimes the best you can do is sit close enough to another person and allow yourself to resonate, and see how it feels.

Resonance is a funny thing. It is reported that when Nicholas Tesla discovered the power of resonance he almost brought a whole building down with a tiny device. Too much resonance can be destructive: the wine glass and the opera singer; or it can be rather fun: singing in the bath, or finding that note in a tunnel. It can be peculiar too: I remember talking to a colleague in a stair well, and his voice simply hit the resonant frequency of the space and boomed, so we had to move to speak normally.

That’s why I have suggested that no-one can understand gender dysphoria who doesn’t have it. But I think more importantly, others don’t know how to understand their own reactions. We are confusing, and we undermine many things others have held to be true. Sit next to us too long, and our natural tone might shake your self-understanding to bits. So what does it take to stick around long enough to know you won’t lose your own integrity? What does it take, to see the person, with the dysphoria, know their pain, and know your love for them still reaches through all that, and find them unthreatening to self? What does it take, to know that love is attached to something very different than the outer layers, and that staying vulnerable to them will allow them to love you without destroying your integrity, self-belief and credibility?

All the time, partnerships and marriages are falling apart, with anger, accusations, a lot of fear, distrust, as a result of gender dysphoria. In the fallout it is the ‘normal’ people who return to ‘normal’ relationships, shake off the weird episode, leave it behind and find what they think of as abiding love. Those who transition so often simply lose. They learn to live without partnership, without intimacy, without that one most trusted, most vulnerable person to love, without the daily reassurance and comfort, and grow strong, singular. It isn’t about loneliness, and it isn’t about becoming hardened. It’s about knowing that you may never again be desired, wanted, reached for, given to, taken. You stand on your own two feet, and trust yourself, protecting your vulnerabilities and try not to remember too vividly what it was to be loved completely. You rationalise that love was not what you thought it was, that it was attached to the wrong part; rope glued onto the paintwork rather than tied securely.

Who understands what it feels like to find the most precious, authentic expression of the best of yourself, the source of all the most profound feelings, hope and love you have ever had and shared, and be excluded because of it? To know that another would rather have no loving, no intimacy, no partnership or companionship, no shared memories – than ever have that with you again, if you are going to be like this.

This is not a recriminatory blog, though it is how things are. No, it is because – having read all the books of how trans* people have pulled through, leaving the wreckage of marriages and partnerships behind, all the stories of how impossible it is to hang onto love when your bud opens and the flower is wrong – it has felt that it is simply a tough fact that being trans* means losing those you love most. People don’t want to be changed by us – something I wrote on a long way back now. If I love you, you will make me gay/lesbian/bi (whatever I most fear imagining). Or: If I accept you, I shall be seen to be too liberal/tolerant of this … behaviour.

And then, too late, two books turn up in quick succession. I promise reviews of both, because I’d like you to read them.

The first to be published is Emma Canton’s If you Really Loved me. The second is Laura Newman’s A Love Less Ordinary: Sharing Life, Laughter and Handbags with My Transgender Partner.

Each is a deep personal exploration of that primary issue: what is the trans* partner doing to me by saying they must change? Yes; transition in a partnership is about two people transitioning. What will it make me, and what right do they have to expect me to be different? In sum, each is an exploration of what it really means to love another person, how that love is attached, what it is attached to, and whether it is, in the end, that important to you.

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A certain knowledge of body

  • Posted on November 4, 2012 at 9:22 am

What a week of extremes. From performance poetry and the realisation that I have credibility as a woman and as a writer, to sitting writing a really simple but difficult letter to my mother. Until this week, her not-quite-famous daughter was just a son who had gone quiet of late. We have never been especially close, and I have always felt awkward with her. Ever since I was as small as I can remember, there were always things I knew just shouldn’t be said or asked. Even if something was self-evidently true, or you needed to know about something unmentionable, a single disapproving look, a pause in conversation, a silence – would remind me to shut up.

Somehow that meant not just questions about sex, but also about emotions, about love, about listening. It sounds harsh, even unkind, but it wasn’t. We bumped along, pretending we weren’t strapped for cash, socially detached, never entertaining friends and neighbours, being a model family and silent about the skeletons in the cupboards. And we had our share. We have a track record on those members of the family about which we do not speak.

It feels related; a story I kept to myself for well over forty years has been told only now. I was 12, maybe 13, in a single-sex grammar school. It was the age when kids start to have crushes, and everyone else seemed to mix with friends that included girls, so it was becoming a regular thing to inscribe personal belongings with ‘I love (Gillian)’ (replace as appropriate). Of course, I didn’t. As a family we did not have a social life, and I certainly wasn’t guided to even ‘suitable’ social venues for kids. Maybe it was the money, or the lack of transport. Maybe it was because we had to be different in order to avoid being identified a less well off – or that people as less well off as we were just weren’t as nice. Anyhow, not to be left out, I inscribed my red geometry set case very neatly (and I normally looked after my things so impeccably well) with ‘I love me’. Nothing could have been so shameful. So with the best match of red electrical insulating tape she could find, my mum covered over my pride and arrogance, even narcissism, and made me proper and respectable again.

How do you feel good about yourself, celebrate any achievement when you are told it is wrong to love yourself? If I didn’t feel like a boy, if I felt left out of my sister’s progress into puberty and adolescence, if I felt pushed into a grey hole where I had to learn to be a proper man, even when certain things were already screaming at me because I didn’t want to be like that, then the last thing in the world was to even think about it, let alone love myself enough to have the inner, honest conversation. I had secrets and hidden things from the age of 14, and I hated myself for it, guilty and angry that I should feel like that, let alone do anything about it. For every success I refused recognition. To think you were good, even excellent, was arrogance and pride. I wasn’t good enough; I never could be. So I was consistently top of the class? I was a concert soloist on two instruments? I went to university, gained a first class honours in an arts degree, with science A-levels behind me, and did a masters? When everyone else was jumping up and down, hugging, calling parents excitedly, celebrating, going out on the town, I phoned home and said simply: ‘Yes, I got the first.’ And that was that.

My sister and I agreed that she should be the bearer of the news in person. There was no softer or easier way of doing it. I knew that I could not risk there ever being a call to her bedside, where I would appear for the very first time as a daughter – and no, we don’t see each other very much at all. So my sister, who has been amazing in coming to terms with me as a woman, made the difficult decision to travel up and tell our mum everything. Well I couldn’t just phone, could I?

‘Hi Mum; it’s me’

‘Oh. Hello. Sorry; your voice sounds funny.’

‘I’m just ringing to let you know I’ve moved into a flat on my own. We’ve separated.’

‘Oh no! That’s terrible. What’s happened, I thought you were so happy?’

‘Mum. I’m a woman. I’m your daughter.’

Whereupon the silence to end all silences. No; that wasn’t a good way of saying it.

So I sat writing a letter to try and unravel a lifetime of undescribed, hidden, mis-understood, gender dysphoria. She knows now, and doesn’t want to see me, though perhaps I could phone. Thank goodness your father never had to know. What would the neighbours think? Of course I can’t tell anyone; this must never get out. So what do I say?

Somewhere behind my knowledge of body, there is a body of knowledge she will never know. She won’t remember it more strongly than what she knew about sex and gender when we could never speak of it before. Clinical or scientific explanations won’t do. It’s just my word, my strangeness, my deviance. She probably thinks I’m some weird kind of transvestite, doing kinky things, rather than a very ordinary woman with a very plain life. And there it may lie. I hope not. A few nights ago I was thinking: I could have been her daughter, and our relationship would have been completely different as a result.

How can I tell her: I really do love myself?

 

PS. I did phone, and actually it is alright. I am surprised. Very surprised really. She will get used to it in time, and she will accept me as I am, though I expect imagining me as a daughter will take a little longer.

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Commitment; a celebration

  • Posted on October 27, 2012 at 5:59 pm

This journey has been described often enough as a roller-coaster, because there really are big ups and downs, certainties and fears, permissions and blockages. It’s inevitable, because you really can’t understand this except from the inside, so people get you wrong all the time, even when they’re doing their best.

This week was a case in point, but more than that, made me think seriously in a way I haven’t had to since transitioning. That’s right, transition. I have done everything that I can do on my own. Just one thing remains that I cannot do for myself.

But first, there I was in the office, surrounded by colleagues including a new starter (with a gorgeous pick-tinted ponytail), and I was accidentally referred to as a man by someone who has never seen me as a man. Woops! Accident, and great embarrassment (not mine). ‘Aaargh! Sorry! I’m always doing that!’

I said the first thing that came into my head, to be reassuring: ‘No, you’re not. You’re doing really well.’ and smiled at him and our new joiner. And got on with it. I guess if it happened much I would get a bit upset. After all it reveals what people really think I am underneath. They don’t naturally think of me as a woman. Yet.

I wasn’t down, or even cross. Just saddened. I have lost everything to become the most authentic I have ever been. I feel fantastic about it, but I can’t put everything right by myself. If it’s good enough to cost me everything, why isn’t it convincing enough at work, where I have never presented as anything else than this?

Then a friend, who returned their forms to the gender clinic on the same day as I did, received their first appointment (only four months waiting!). Grrr. I decided to call yet again about my change of address, and asked ‘I don’t suppose …?’ And knock me down with a feather – a letter had been posted (to my old address). Suddenly my horizon was visible again. What I really needed was to give someone a great big hug. Never mind!

Do you remember the queue for the water flume? Or the rollercoaster? The joking, the sense of bravery, dispelling thoughts of being scared or sick! Then you’re in. It’s a smooth flat ride. You’re doing fine. Then the ratchet picks your car up with a click and the rumbling starts. Now you are being driven, hauled up and there is a real sense of commitment. What you face, you must face now. It’s serious. That’s what it feels like to have that vital appointment. When I walk in, a woman who transitioned 9 months ago, on illicit hormones and working full-time, I don’t expect a refusal or a doubt, but it is a hurdle to clear. And so I feel I am on track for the one thing I can’t do for myself, with disruption, risk, pain, discomfort, and finally the peace of being complete and right. It certainly focuses the mind.

But it is so very much what I want. I know – from the deep envy I felt when a friend had her surgery this week.

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