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Living in the present

  • Posted on April 23, 2012 at 11:57 pm

There is no yesterday: yesterday does not exist.
There is no tomorrow: tomorrow does not exist.
For our yesterdays are merely our interpretations,
and our tomorrows are but our imaginings.

There is only now. There is only this.

This is how I worked it out some time ago. I guess it’s Buddhist at heart. I still believe it’s true. This is the nature of time, of existence, of life. But like you, I fear the future for what it might take away, and grieve the past as past futures – so badly imagined and now so critically interpreted.

And then I sit and meditate, and all my awareness is that I am whole, that I am safe, that I am present. And that unmistakeably, I am woman. And I look around now and I see men of all kinds busy being men, and I think: how could I ever have believed I was really one of those? As I came home today I had a sense of overwhelming gratitude that being a man was not my future, that all my tomorrows are as a woman.

Which all sounds terribly obsessed with gender, and not at all to do with the here and now. In a previous blog I spoke of the plea that ‘I am still here!’, meaning that inside I have not changed, that this now is the same as all my past nows in terms of how I am expressed. Maybe. I struggle for illustrations that make this make sense to other people. It’s like putting glasses on for the first time and realising what normal is supposed to feel like: the same eyes, but seeing clearly, the same you looking out, and everyone else calling you four-eyes. Who? Me?

Something in me is crying out to be loved for who I am, not for what I appear to be, or have appeared to be.

Does my present re-interpret my past, and change it?

I hold out my hand, and say: this is my hand, the same hand, that tells the story of my life, as you – as I – have known it. It has been wondered at, it has been functional, it has known drains and delicacy, it has destroyed and it has created. It has helped and it has healed. It has enacted at all times for me.

And this is my heart, the same heart that first loved, that felt, that feels, that hopes. Unchanged, all its hopes and expressions have been from the same source as they are today. Only today I know that if my heart has gender at all, it is not the heart of a man. In every present moment now past, I should have known, but my interpretation of the past is that I did not know. Un-named, ungendered, this female heart of mine, like my hand, did so much. As the source of so much, it was unquestioned, and was nothing but loved and accepted in return. Every interpretation, every imagining, created a present that was fitting, that was good.

But this heart of mine is now named! I am so completely filled with the joy of that recognition, that my present is alive and lit as never before, despite all the other anxious matters of employment, earning, returning to economic viability, and finding my social place again. But there go my imaginings … Will I be able to find fulfilling work, with the now inherent disadvantages of not just being 55, and female, but trans? Be present! Tomorrow does not exist!

And there go my interpretations too. Have I only been loved because I was living under false pretences? My hand was the hand of a woman?! My heart was a female heart?! If that had been known, would either have had consent? Does my present invalidate all my past, reinterpreting it?

And there goes my present … There is only now – and now, I am a woman in some inappropriate places. What my hand did yesterday it may not do today. All that came from my heart yesterday may be an inappropriate expression of its aspirations for tomorrow.

I am woman. There is only now. Yesterday does not exist. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only this, and in this alone is where all love lies – and where it has only ever lain. I must trust, I must be present. In truth, nothing else actually exists at all.

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This is the hand

  • Posted on April 23, 2012 at 10:51 pm
This poem is reflecting continuity and change, versatility and curiosity, selfhood and identity. Hands that reach out can be held or let go. Our hands are the stories of our lives … This is a Brief History of Mine.

This is the hand
that curled around the enormity
of a finger outstretched in wonder
at my tiny, perfect, nails.

This is the hand
that pointed to nipples in the bath
asking: ‘mummy what are these for?’
no – not for anything.

This is the hand
that stool-high stirred a cake, that sat
gritty, dirty, mixing cement for a wall –
distinguishing neither.

This is the hand
that learned the pen, figure and script,
to describe, shooting high: ‘I know, miss!’
too often to answer.

This is the hand
that dressed a paper doll and made a dart,
that sprayed the scent and built with bricks
high enough to fall.

This is the hand
that curled around my enormity
not knowing what it was for or why,
and was afraid.

This is the hand
that wrote songs, found what it was
to touch another, know resonance,
strike a chord.

This is the hand
that painted pictures with film,
with brush, and the brush of filmy
sensuous things.

This is the hand
that built from wood, that sewed, sawed
ironed, mended with iron – and delved
the stinking drain.

This is the hand
that held a bucket of blood – loved, willed
that everything would be alright again,
but limp with fear.

This is the hand
that held the finger of the boy
as long as my forearm, in wonder
at his tiny perfect nails.

This is the hand
that made cakes into cars and, blackened
with grease, made cars go a little longer
earnings eased.

This is the hand
that every day turned mind into money
and money into memories, memories
into bonds.

This is the hand
that gave you your first orgasm,
breaking out of my closing preserve,
ending its cheat.

This is the hand
instrument of the heart, that curls now
around this new enormity, outstretched
and is empty.

This is the hand
that stirred, that moved, that made –
that unnamed, but always female, has
become inappropriate.

This is the hand.
Discovered.
That waves.
That drowns.

2012 © Andie Davidson

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Name changing

  • Posted on April 14, 2012 at 12:15 am

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
(Romeo and Juliet)

Isn’t identity, in naming, fascinating? Juliet wished Romeo could just be Romeo without the family name that caused such conflict. When I protest that I am still me – same eyes, same hands, same heart – I am saying my gender title and name do not define the person, and changing them does not change me, my memories or my intentions.

But names are memories aren’t they? I remembered the name of the girl I played with at my first school, aged five. I remember her face very well too, even now, though we soon after went to separate schools afterwards. She was Jane. And remembering her brought back a host of other memories from that time, including the huge green petrol-driven scythe that cut the grass, and the smell of it, or the milk crates (and the smell of them). And I remember that friendship. Somewhere around this time I started having nightmares. Nothing specific, just frightening, and I fought them away by making up stories in my head about the two koala glove puppets my sister and I had, imagining them having a happy day. Mine was Joe, hers was Jane. I also remember the name of the girl I so wanted to sit next to and be friends with, aged 11 (girls and boys mostly sat separately until then). I remember her face very well, even though we soon after went to separate schools. She was Jayne. And this brings back a host of memories too, including the aromatic tobacco of our teacher who smoked a pipe in break times and played a concertina, and thought it a good thing to mix boys and girls in together. And then there were our neighbours through these years; we didn’t play round other people’s houses much but they were a brother and sister too, of our ages, and we often went round on a Saturday. She was Jane too, and as we grew up, I was diverted to play with her brother instead. It was strange that growing up meant growing away from girls, and then going to a boys’ school. I do remember my friends at grammar school, and have related a names story a little while back in a blog here. There were no boys called Jane – only Shirley. But I did end up partnering a girl in chemistry lessons when the school subsequently was merged with two girls’ grammar schools. I remember we were pretty good at titrations. She was called Jane.

No, I was never called Tarzan, in case you were wondering, and all these significant Janes weren’t the only girls I knew, and as it happens, I never had a girlfriend called Jane either. All I am noting is that names bring back a lot of memories, and that this is part of how trans people make decisions about what to call themselves. To lose a former life, or to keep it? To take a the name of a family member, friend or significant other? Many names have male and female equivalents, but some of us want to dissociate, others don’t want to throw anything away, some want a clean break, others to retain continuity and make life easier. Sometimes a name with particular associations is important too, and this played an important part for me. I can understand all these points of view, and it is a lovely time to assert your true identity.

(I didn’t call myself Jane.)

This week my Deed Poll forms came back, with my legal change of title and name, and so I had to start the paper chase to set many records straight. Some may take a while, and some have to follow in sequence, and some in completeness cannot yet be done. But it was remarkably simple to just phone quite a few and report the change. After going through the bank details, carefully repeating that the title was changed to ‘Ms’, I felt quite elated. Then: ‘Anything else, sir?’ she said … Oh well! Friends have said that the hardest bit to remember is she/her. What I like most on the documents is that I am no longer allowed to use the old name, and nor is anyone else. Like the piles of clothes awaiting redistribution, it will never be worn again, and like the clothes, sits there with lots of memories attached to it. But just like I never stopped wearing clothes, so I have merely put on what I prefer, and to be honest, like the clothes, I had gradually introduced Andie into my life already. It’s been in my email and online for ages, even on my bank cards, and all the time it’s been me, not some intruder or imposter.

Once again I am reminded that, as I have revisited my life story to make better sense of it, I have been there narrating a subtext all along. The conflict was there in the name, like Romeo’s, and now the rose has a corrected name. To me it’s not just as sweet, it’s sweeter.

Poems ‘Jane’, ‘How the boy got her name’, and ‘Dear Alan’ feature in the collection Realisations.

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Je ne regrette rien

  • Posted on April 9, 2012 at 8:23 pm

We all regret a lot, but today’s Guardian (UK) listed Top five regrets of the dying, and these should be our regrets before it’s too late. Why not regret them now, while we can do something about it? The five included ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’, which meant a lot to me.

So what did people expect that held me back? None of us knew, actually. It’s mostly in retrospect, as I looked at the pieces and put the jigsaw together, that I realised that I had done everything ‘right’ in the wrong way. I have been a breadwinner – and a successful one, I was a father figure – albeit a gentle one, and a good and faithful husband – albeit a feminine one inside. But I wore the clothes and presented myself in a way that I now know was uncomfortable because it made me look right to everyone else, but meant I never felt I really fitted in like that. Square pegs do fit in round holes, so long as the diagonal is the diameter. But after a while, either the corners start to wear, or the circle starts to catch. The friction got too much, and everyone else got confused, except for me, because I understood at last.

Yesterday I wasted a lot of time in great anxiety (I am a bit of a perfectionist) because my wife remarked that this blog site ‘didn’t look like that᾿ to her. Oh no! It’s been looking wrong all this time! I live on Firefox, Safari, Chrome – any browser except Internet Explorer (IE). Now Microsoft may be big, but it does sometimes live in a world of its own, and when it comes to certain standards (CSS if you know what that means) it likes to do something different. My beautiful orchids were obscured, the page ranged left, pictures pushed out of place, simply because one little instruction that means everything to everyone doesn’t to Internet Explorer. I tracked it all down, fixed it, learned something new, and now everyone can see my pages as they are supposed to look. Microsoft had been expecting me to absorb all their quirks, and I had been beautifully doing my own thing. There was no real gain, and I didn’t write anything useful all day, all that happened was that I was looking right to everyone at last.

Sometimes you think from the inside that you are doing everything right. Others see something different and think that is how you are supposed to look. Sometimes you give up: you could read my blog before on IE and ignore things being in the wrong place, or just think I wasn’t very good at web design! In the same way, you could look at me as a man before, and think I was just a bit unconventional or not good at having friends. Now I am as I should be (or on the way) people are confused. They got to live with the square peg because it fitted, or the skewed page because it could be read, or the bloke because he worked OK like that. I realise I wasn’t doing anything the way I was because I was a man, I was just being me, and if was doing things from a female perspective I thought it was normal. It was being seen and expected to be male that fitted everyone else’s expectations – except mine. And that’s why I keep saying: ‘but I’m still here! I am still just being me, just filling a bigger space differently!’ and everyone else says I am not fitting their expectations any more.

A little while ago a trans friend said to me with utter conviction: ‘I just don’t want to die a man!’

Back to the top. I have to be true to myself, because the cost of not doing so will be that regret on my dying breath, and I have a life to live that doesn’t belong to anyone else.

It kinda makes sense of my obscure Eostre poem on here. I don’t have to deny my life to date, it doesn’t have to die, and I am not ashamed of any of it. There is no dying and rising for my male life here to rescue me from evil – just a coming to life, a dawning, of my female life as a just fulfilment.

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Identity

  • Posted on April 4, 2012 at 5:49 pm

Identity is another word that is perhaps as hard to define as gender. I remember when ‘identify with’ was a new phrase that caused some difficulty with grammarians and any of us who couldn’t quite understand it because we never thought we’d ever done it.

Fascinating though, because identity isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I am who I am (isn’t that Yahweh’s response to Moses?). I think, therefore I am: Descartes. How could I be anything or anyone else?? I have found myself telling people recently that rather trite thing: ‘just be yourself; no-one else can do it as well as you can!’ But it is true – isn’t it?

After yesterday’s blog about the self(ish) half-life, I have been thinking more about identity. My desperately synthesizing brain hoovers up things I hear or see, and among today’s flotsam are a deed poll form on my desk saying who I am, my LinkedIn world where puzzlement reigns over the ex-colleague who doesn’t look quite the same but does all the same things, and my Facebook page which isn’t my face any more inviting people to transition to my other page. It’s also an unformed poem that will arrive one day that says ‘I᾿m still here’.

If you wear glasses you will know that feeling of the first time you could see again properly, and then got so used to them you found yourself looking for them when they were already on your nose! And yet everyone else said: ‘there’s something different about you …’ and couldn’t quite place it. The view from the inside was the same, but clearer. The appearance from the outside may have seemed quite strange. Fancy dress parties can give you very uncomfortable feelings too, and your sweet darling child in a grotesque hallowe’en mask can be very disturbing. Change your gender presentation, and all that you are is subsumed by what your identity does to someone else’s identity.

I have to admit this took me by surprise: that my identity, with which I had struggled for so long on the inside, but which I felt only found understanding rather than change, had actually shaped other people’s identities too. Perhaps that is my truth: was I was so good at being a man because I was shaped by all those identities around me? Like stress-balls packed tightly in a box, the memory of shape is only revealed when taken out. I came out and found my shape – but those I was packed in with most tightly then also found their true shape, and it didn’t always fit with mine any more! Had I really shaped their identity and stopped them being true to self? I say that about me, so perhaps I should not be surprised after all.

I feel different living now as I do, but I don’t feel that I am different. The ‘what’ of my presentation and declared identity is no more to me in some ways that the glasses I first put on to make me normal again. I am still here, looking out, and the ‘who’ is completely unchanged, except for the joy of restoration to a single identity instead of one that was increasingly split. The same eyes, the same hands, the same terrible jokes but the same gentle humour; the same concerns, attitudes and fears; the same loves, the same aspirations to live a good life, the same courage to do what’s right. The same needs. Nothing I ever did that felt best in life was because I was a man. The suit might have been impressive, the feelings of not belonging in male-dominated meetings was not. And yes, let’s be personal, sex for me is a pooling of resources, an equal sharing, never a male dominance, never done because of my apparent gender, never because of the body I was given.

And yet for all that, gender is such a powerful thing when identified, that other than for my own sense of identity, I have to the external world lost my identity and gained another that is completely different, and that needs to be assessed all over again for validity, for preference, for befriending or for unfriending. The deed poll says it, LinkedIn says it, Facebook says it, even my family says it. It must be true; there, my passes no longer work, and hang around my neck useless and irreplaceable. The pictures, the names, the codes of acceptance, the permissions to enter: all these externals, in the end are regarded as my identity, not the me that I am inside that has simply come home and finally belongs only to find some people have, well, just gone home too. But my door is always open, because it always has been. It’s part of my identity to be like that.

The poem in the adjacent post to this (Losing my touch) was a vision I had of returning to an old familiar place and finding it shut down and deserted behind a chain-link fence. You’ll get the gist, but I just thought as a poem it worked quite well too.

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