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Equality, mistakes and diversity

  • Posted on March 11, 2012 at 3:21 pm

What an extraordinary day. Today in Roman Catholic churches all over the UK, congregations will be exhorted to stand up for tradition. Nothing new in that, since the RC church has more tradition and ritual associated with it than any other.

Today it is about the tradition of marriage. Well, actually about the western christian church’s tradition about marriage. It seems the tradition that marriage is first and foremost about procreation and raising kids (and therefore really tough luck if it turns out you cannot) and that every other reason for a committed, sealed partnership is a poor second. Including sex for bonding, comfort or just pleasure. That seems to be allowed of course, because between the fun and bonding, there is a family.

Marriage is supposed to continue for life by this argument, so that there is a stable extended family. Grandparents matter too. But marriage is not about equality.

The matter of fertility

Nowadays we can tell before marriage if we are fertile, whereas when the early church adopted various existing marriage rites and principles, people largely could not. That’s a shame, because the primacy of procreation and family would have meant infertile couples could not marry – or the purpose and benefits of marriage would have been expressed differently. If so, today’s tradition argument against same-sex marriage would not have arisen in quite the same way.

It isn’t quite so clear what individual priests in the RC church like to say about couples who marry with no intention of raising a family (or who cannot) – a very recent statement by one was clear that marriage would not be offered. So is this as sinful as having sex with someone to whom you are not married? Since one of the arguments about same-sex marriage is that the sex itself is sinful, it would appear to be on a par with deliberately persistent non-procreative hetero sex within marriage. But maybe we do know about that too, since there is clear RC policy on contraception, even though the other denominations do not.

So is fertility the real heart of the marriage tradition? How does that inform our structure of marriage today?

The Bible doesn’t have a lot to say about lesbian relationships, maybe because it assumes no real sharing of fluids, at a time when reproductive biology was pretty rudimentary? Gay sex isn’t explained, but I can only assume that the sharing of fluids that were not understood was, on the face of it, as risky a thing to do as eating parasite-infested pork and similar forbidden foods.

Divine mistakes or divine permission?

Is all this a sound basis for marriage tradition, as if traditions have never changed? Are all traditions ‘right first time’? If so, that is the best example of total quality assurance ever: give Moses an ISO 9001! As for mistakes in manufacture, isn’t that the basis for evolution and survival? Creationists aside, we don’t call the platypus one of God’s mistakes, and similarly, traditions evolve. This marriage tradition isn’t a duck just because it has a beak and lays eggs.

Gay, lesbian, queer, intersex and trans people do not choose to be how they are. Not many would strongly claim that God deliberately made them that way, and certainly the RC church (this is today’s conversation, I’m not picking on anyone) cannot say either that God did so, or that He (I insist – She) made a mistake. At best, God ‘lets LGBTQI and infertility happen’, but many in the RC church implicitly deny that anything other than a heteronormative procreative way of being can be socially valid. Tradition excludes, not God. Which is odd, since St Paul has a very strong line on ‘neither slave nor freeman, neither Greek nor Roman’ kind of equality in the eyes of God.

And our planet’s remarkable biodiversity: is it a story of divine deliberation, mistakes or laissez faire? Or is the variety of penguins authentic, whilst homosexuality among penguins (yes, and with no social pressure) is not? Look at racial diversity: Babel is a mythic attempt to explain that, and the result is seen as diversity, which increasingly the whole world respects. Now look at gender and sexuality as we understand it today, in terms of what genetic factors drive it. Why is that not set at the same level of diversity as race, the platypus and the gay penguin?

LGBTQI and marriage equality

Society for all its traditions changes, hugely. Knowledge and understanding likewise, whether of biology, sociology, health – or diversity.

So God does not make mistakes over gender and sexuality, does not do this deliberately, and the ‘woops!’ result therefore means everyone who does not actually procreate within a marriage and then stay in that marriage, is an outsider to the RC faith, and God’s world, and is forbidden the primary partnering relationship based on love?

Civil marriage has tagged for too long on the absurdity of this particular religious tradition with all its notional exceptions. A church, founded on the love of God and a message to love one another, is exceptionally discriminatory and rejecting when the one solid rite of creating stable committed partnerships of love is so selective. As such, the church has no business at all telling everyone else how they can express their love in formal social relationships. And the one thing that really sticks in my craw is that when one partner in a marriage comes to understand they are transgender, to establish their authentic gender identity, the marriage has to be dissolved and replaced with a civil partnership, which is not available to heterosexual couples! Only a fossilised church tradition could find logic in that.

I hope that individuals in RC congregations everywhere also think, and fail to see the purpose and validity of the marriage tradition as it is being expressed today. I hope they also fail to see the authority in a church with an appalling reputation throughout its history, recently with respect to abuse of children in its care, and make their own minds up about equality.

And I hope that our civil lawmakers brush today’s message aside, with those from other traditions in recent weeks, and embrace the diversity that exists, with a truly equal regard and respect.

 

For more about how this situation arose, Christine Burns has an excellent article at Just Plain Sense.

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Calling names and name-calling: gender terminology

  • Posted on February 22, 2012 at 1:09 pm

It’s a funny thing, but I still remember from 1986, the class roll-call. Every morning and afternoon, the Register. Alty, Anderson, Bird, Burkinshaw, Catton, Cookson – then me. Names stick. And somewhere down that list, O’Donovan will remember the half dozen names before his. They weren’t our real names of course. Budgie, Bugs, Pod were who we were. It didn’t matter what teachers called us, we identified each other differently; we knew each other, and if Bugs got his name for his front teeth, nobody minded.

One year, someone decided that Cookie should become Shirley. Now that was different. Were we all going to get girls’ names, and what did it mean? I felt very uncomfortable with what name I might get. It lasted a week or too, and it was a bad idea, so by consensus we dropped it. It was a boys’ school, you knew what to do to survive with minimal hassle, so for a while he was Copperknob instead (red hair!).

Naming ambiguity has been in the media, blogs and TV a lot in recent times. They always will be I guess. I remember discovering that in Australia Durex was something different, and much later, when doing my MBA, going into the fraught world of international brands. ‘Marathon’ chocolate bars sounded pretty robust, while the renamed ‘Snickers’ still sounds more like knickers to me, or a cheap snigger. Even that last word sounds dodgy these days.

Gender terminology

Despite the global vocabulary brought by the Internet, terms for gender and sexuality remain difficult. In one country or continent, the connotations (like pants) can be quite different. What we define in the UK as cross-dressing, as transgender, as gender-queer (again, ‘queer’ used to mean something else) and as transsexual, might be clearer than ever – but not everyone agrees. And terms almost become names, especially when someone is telling you what they think you are. The grammar is as tedious as school: what is the correct pronoun, when is a term only an adjective, not an adjectival noun? When is an abbreviation reserved (only a tranny can call a tranny a tranny) such that outsiders using it becomes offensive?

Any social group with commonalities will want to define, as we did at school, what the names mean. But the teachers weren’t wrong. We went and changed names mid-term – now that could be confusing! So it is with gender labels. There is a definite role for academia here, an academia that understands from the inside, not that makes it up from observation alone (remember quantum effects: the observer alters the state of the observed? It holds true for some social research too). And I think we should allow it, and if necessary bend to it, simply to achieve a reliable vocabulary that we can share with a bemused world.

The gender vocabulary needs to broad but clear, and allow for respect of many states. This week I have read comments online by lads who think gender-diversity means ‘weirdos’ who should (not could) be made fun of. And I have read as much from ‘lads’ who think banter about rape is OK, presumably because women are not equal as people to them. Worse, I have read hateful comments by trans people about other trans people who don’t fit their idea of sufficient authenticity, where one state of trans life and identity is real and another is mere pretence and deceit. Radical feminists can be truly hateful too about trans people not being ‘real’.

Naming middle genders

We need to describe the middle – the third states of gender – better, and trans people need to find their own place of comfort and true belonging without feeling someone else’s concept of gender authenticity must be their goal. Me? I don’t need to be a woman. I never really can be, and however much I risk my well-being to gain my dream breasts, or a better jaw or remodel my genitals, my bones were sculpted by testosterone, and I lived as a man for half a century. That has left an indelible mark. But before you shout at me because you need or needed maximal reassignment: I respect your choices and needs. I know without shadow of doubt that at one end of the spectrum, physical identity is absolute, and gender positivity places you in a traditionally binary place. Maybe one day it will for me too. But meanwhile for all the two-spirits, dual-gendered, female husbands, gender-queers, androgynes or whatever – there needs to be validation.

If you find you are on an unexpected journey (and unless your ticket is a lot clearer than mine), you really cannot know your destination. Knowing it probably won’t make it any easier, other than having some kind of end in sight. Gender dysphoria has degrees, and you don’t have to place yourself on the Benjamin scale or whatever right now if you don’t want. It might be useful later; maybe it will have changed later.

For now, I call myself transgender; I am crossing boundaries and I don’t know where it will end. At one level I have no choice, and at another I do have choices I can make. Finding my place, though, does mean I need a reliable description of where I am. Apparently, according to some comments I’ve had, I am just a man in a dress, assigned to fetishistic sidelines where frankly, I have never belonged – because their definition of transgender is terribly narrow and they own it!

I agree with Grrl Alex that it is quite legitimate to redefine by asserting individuality: you don’t have to do what anyone else does. You haven’t become another stereotype just because your gender discomfort has caught up with you.

We shall all remember the roll-call of gender terms, and hopefully definitions will become authoritative, but what we call ourselves does need to match (the more informed) academic study, and have clear meanings in the media playground and the world at large. Cookson? Cookie? Copperknob? Shirley? If you read this you’ll appreciate I was a friend, whatever; and Shirley was a bad idea at the time.

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Of friends and vulnerability

  • Posted on February 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm

I don’t believe anyone trans comes out with complete confidence, ready-made, knowing all the best replies, happy to learn what you got wrong when someone ‘reads’ you and is rude (‘Hey! Thanks! That’s really useful! I’ll remember that next time.’), and shrugging off all the uncertainties of living in a new space. But it is one thing to learn to walk in heels, lift your voice naturally and believe in it, and quite another not to walk among strangers in the street, but face your best friend and tell them the news.

I have been extraordinarily comforted by friends who have asked about the nail polish, or the lengthening hair, and have listened to the short version of my story, and not just embraced something quite novel to their experience, but congratulated me on my honesty and courage, and wished me well. I have no problem talking to anyone who wants to know, even if in the end neither of us would say we quite understand! And so far, touch wood, no-one outside my family has criticised, doubted or scorned. OK, I don’t know what they say when I’ve gone, but on the whole the gossip grape-vine has remained quiet. Is it just that all along I’ve been a jolly nice person, a helpful go-out-of-my way sort of person? That I get involved, that I care? Maybe. And now I hope I just go on being all that, rather than getting angry, hurt, distrustful and self-protecting about being different.

Instead, I am in some ways being deliberately vulnerable. I don’t want to get locked inside a thick skin that changes my shape just so I don’t get hurt. I shall get hurt, of that I have no doubt, and some will call me naïve. But there’s a bit of me that says if I get seen to stand up for myself without getting bitter, it might help someone else do the same. If trans people are seen to be damaged, hurt and grouchy, they will never just be normal to everyone else. I’m OK with being trans. Even though it might cost pretty much everything I hold dear.

But telling your best friend? Ah.

Telling your wife and family is sort of inevitable, and kind as you are, however helpful in explaining, sharing books, talking it through, you know you have changed something pretty fundamental. (Have I broken a contract? For richer, for poorer … for maler or femaler?) Whatever I want, they have choices too, and they might break my heart. And there is nothing much I can do about that, because they have to know, in every detail, and forecast where I might be going before I even know myself.

Best friends are different. How much I say and when is up to me. We all say that friends who walk away are not really friends at all, but we know the ones we really don’t want to lose – because friends are our support network, the place we go when even things at home aren’t so hot. Independent advice, outside perspective and all that. And some friends are good for one thing, some for another. Best friends are those we expose our vulnerabilities to – and coming out as transgender is an extremely vulnerable time. If I tell a particular friend, it could make me feel a lot worse, a lot less supported, and lose me a key point in my network of a friend who can explain and support me to other friends.

I got to a point where a number of friends knew, among a lot of others who share my social space that did not. And the worst thing would be for a best friend, a close friend, to find out in the wrong way and feel I hadn’t trusted them. I did – but that didn’t stop me feeling scared to lose them or make them more distant. After all, I do appreciate that a lot of us, when challenged about being associated with something unusual, can suddenly lose commitment to avoid criticism. And being transgender is still like infecting or contaminating other people’s lives.

So for a long time I knew I had to bite the bullet with a particular friend: possibly change a friendship forever, with a history of deep sharing in difficult times over a number of years. And I did lose sleep over it, and I did put it off, and several times I nearly said what I had to say, only to duck at the last moment. I couldn’t ask for an urgent meeting because that would set a scare agenda; I just had to decide to make it the next available slot together.

Here’s some useful advice if you’re in the same place: tell a few other people that this is what you intend to do. Tell them your fears, and cut your escape route, knowing that at least there might be a bit of sympathy if it all goes wrong, because they are going to ask you how it went.

I told my best friend over coffee a few days ago. I said she hadn’t said anything about my nails, hair, bracelets, rings … the day she turned up in my garden, and my trousers and t-shirt weren’t quite male enough, and my toes were pink. ‘Oh!’ she said ‘I didn’t think I needed to say anything. I thought you were just expressing your feminine side. I’ve always known that was strong in you.’

For her, I am just the same person, illuminated a bit more starkly perhaps, but my happiness is part of the friendship, and now I know I have another pillar in my life for when things don’t go quite so well. The transgender experience is one of vulnerability, and sometime you can feel like the butterfly at the end of summer, but it’s the colours that keep you going, hopping flowers on the breeze instead of chewing leaves. And my friend has made some things suddenly seem a lot easier. I thank her from the bottom of my heart.

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It’s your problem, not mine

  • Posted on February 11, 2012 at 6:12 pm

When I pull up the meditation cushions and feel myself in every detail resting on the earth, hands in my lap, eyes at rest, focusing on my breathing and being present, being in the now, I find peace. I don’t need any approval, I don’t need any definition or description, and I genuinely can cultivate loving-kindness within myself.

I am at peace with myself and the world: everything flows and belongs, and I know I can deal with anything in a spirit of wholeness. It’s real – not an illusion or separation from the world; I just know that I belong, that I need no approval or permission to be what or who I am. I leave my gender behind too, except that strangely I know I am female in this state. I lose awareness of all my male parts and feel the presence of female parts, and it is comforting, though not essential.

My fears dissipate too, as if I simply know that there is no harm ultimate enough to destroy my being, and that hurts faced well are not enduring harms. But no, I can’t yet live like this nearly enough of the time, and I don’t pull up my cushions often enough to improve things. But it does help.

A while ago I settled on this thought:

There is no hurt except that which we take to ourselves.

I still think it is true, and remember early days out in female trans mode, when perhaps I hadn’t developed finesse so well, or drew attention by being too self-aware. I did get some abuse, and one incident is memorable. A young ‘man’ with girlfriend beside him in his car, wound down his window as he launched out across a dual carriage way, and shouted up the street:

‘Are you a man?!’

‘Hey! Mister Transvestite! Are you a man?!’

Maybe there was more, but it was more a case of a duck’s back than an elephant’s hide. If he had not been in such a vulnerable position halfway across streams of traffic, I had every intention of walking back and responding with something like ‘Yes, I suppose I am to you, but I am a nice one. Are you a man? And (in the direction of his girlfriend perhaps) a nice one?’

I don’t mind explaining to anyone that I am transgender and what it means. Maybe it helps when others like me can’t handle being challenged. But the main thought was that this person had a problem, not me. He had some deep-seated need to impress his girlfriend with his bold manliness – to show he was the real man around here, that he was the clever, observant one who had ‘spotted the tranny’ (I hope she was more embarrassed than impressed, but maybe not). Why was it not just unusual to him to see me? Why was it not enough to just comment to his girlfriend that he thought he’d seen a trans person (like: Goodness, I’ve just seen a yellow pillarbox!) Why did he need to seek to expose and embarrass another person in public? Why did he need to impress?

I don’t have a problem, I’m just transgender. But him? Sadly I had to leave him with his problem.

And that takes me to recent Twitterings, comments left on news media online, Facebook trails etc., where an aggressive, loud and highly abusive ‘lad’ culture has repeatedly overstepped the bounds of not just politeness, common decency and tolerance, but has been illegal and menacing, representing rape as acceptable, all women as worthless except for use in aggressive sex, and loud young men as setting every agenda with no possibility of being challenged. And Tweets to transgender sites to say that all trans people should be killed. All blatantly homophobic, transphobic or misogynist.

Do we have a problem? Clearly they do, but whilst I could have been just nice back to the sad person in the car, what damage is this culture likely to do to wider society? In the case of the Unilad magazine online that carried the endorsements to rape (in reader comments), it was stopped. It was clearly illegal, and with astute screen captures of the online conversation as it went on, incontrovertible. It wasn’t argued with, it was dealt with. But reading a follow-up article by a university student in The Guardian decrying the culture, lo and behold the same laddish culture streamed out below the piece, protesting that this kind of abusive talk was just a joke – ‘Can’t you see the funny side?!’ And what I found just as disturbing was girls who agreed: ‘We trash boys in our humour too!’ So it’s just quid pro quo and the world goes on. I (we, society) have no need to worry, because they don’t have a problem. Karma is balanced.

Is it?

I was sorry that I didn’t speak with the young ‘man᾿ in the car and his girlfriend, because someone else would get his rudeness and he would not have moved on personally either. I am sorry that some girls share the laddish culture, because I think it does affect their sense of self-worth and self-esteem and right to take a lead. Why do they need to take the hurt by being hurtful? It is not acceptable! So why engage with the problems that these ‘lads’ have? I want them all to be better than this: to discover what it is to be a whole person, to be loving and to be kind.

So whilst it isn’t my problem, I shall draw theirs into my meditation so I am always well-prepared to respond when their culture overlaps mine, not to accept any hurt, and to address their problem with kindness and show it as it is, unacceptable, but just not necessary.

I am transgender, and I am kind and loving. What are you?

 

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The truth can sting

  • Posted on February 9, 2012 at 10:27 pm

I often reflect on why people love each other, and what can change that, as times and life changes. There is the obvious case of a husband who turns to drink or to crime, and we would all urge the wife to leave him – or better, kick him out. It’s unacceptable behaviour, unlikely to change, and we recognise it. So why do some stick by their man and take the punishment, claiming still to love him? I won’t attempt to answer that here.

Flip that thought now, and think of spouses who have to deal with accidents, illnesses and disabilities. We pity parents with disabled children, thankful it is not us, but recognise that one can’t divorce a baby that isn’t quite as ‘normal’ as expected. But the husband or wife, when the other goes blind, loses their faculties prematurely, or becomes immobilised? Again, we pity, we sympathise, we even help if we can, but we recognise that it can all become too much. And for a young person, we endorse a divorce that allows the healthy one to find a new and more fulfilling partnership for the rest of their lives.

I just watched a BBC 4 Horizon programme on what makes us good or evil. It was disturbing in concluding that psychopaths have a clearly marked genetic disposition that, combined with an abusive or damaging upbringing, makes them prone to acts we would describe as evil – and yet it is not entirely their fault. Somehow their free will (still present) has been compromised. What if all our antisocial traits have biological roots? The programme asserted the role of oxytocin in making people team players (it is measurably increased in pre-match warm-ups), whilst recognising that testosterone creates the aggressive competitive drive so the team wins the game.

No-one should endure violence, physical or psychological, just because they see the good in another, and with a good understanding of causes, maybe we can make ‘evil’ people less dangerous. And there passes the shadow of clinical cures for homosexuality … and the assignment of gender identity disorders in directories of mental illness.

But as these thoughts about causes drifted around my head, I also remembered a story in today’s Daily Mail. The headline was ’My husband became my wife: transgender woman reveals how a bee-sting led to her sex-change … and how the woman she had married stayed by her’. Setting aside the mis-concept of sex change, the story reveals that a very rare reaction to the sting toxin led to a dramatic reduction in testosterone.

There are two strands that came out of this for me: first, the woman, Chloe, was actually only unmasked. Beneath the testosterone there was something about her ready and waiting to be fully expressed as female. It wasn’t the bee sting that was powerful, it had been the testosterone. She did have a prior history of some gender uncertainty, but had fathered children and been a good husband for eight years. She too had no choice in the matter, and genetically, psychologically, she simply became what she was beneath the influence of the male hormone. But second, was the response of her wife, Renee. We find in the article that they are no longer married (they are two women, neither of whom describe themselves as lesbian) but they do share their home and family as two women together in a committed relationship of love.

What is it about Renee’s love that meant she didn’t wave goodbye to Chloe? Many women would have done. Those who have read Helen Boyd’s account of living on the brink of her husband transitioning to female in She’s not the Man I Married, find how heart-rending it can be (and Helen and Betty did stay together through transition). I don’t think anyone would equate the decision to stay after gender identity change, with the decision to support a disabled partner (total loyalty through major change) – but should they? Does either break a marriage contract, in that neither situation is one of choice?

That takes us on to the issue of Gender Recognition Certificates (GRC), and the requirement to dissolve a marriage in order to be officially recognised in the gender that feels most authentic. (How odd that you could then reunite in a civil partnership, even though neither partner identifies as lesbian …) It makes us examine our authenticity, and the awkward concept of who you are in context of what you are. We do contract marriages and partnerships because of what we are (male, female, fertile, intelligent, capable, wealthy even), but it is really more because of who we are (supportive, loving, helpful, kind, lively, entertaining, like-minded). Yes, the two do merge, but what I mean here is that I am still the same person if, once wealthy, I fall on hard times, whereas I am really not the same if I lose my loving and kind personality. The GRC says that the what has changed even though the who is merely a lot happier – and therefore ‘something must be done’.

My heteronormative upbringing meant I never even entertained the possibility that I might find a man attractive. I was only looking at women when I found my wife. I’m still not attracted to men in any way, and my wife’s experience is the same the other way round. So it’s hardly surprising that the question of attractiveness comes up. Big time. I am still attracted to the woman I love so much; she, of course finds it rather difficult. What I am has been changing. Who I am, I maintain (from the personal, internal experience) has not.

Back to where we began: what makes people love each other? Or stop loving? Why, or how much, does my gender identity affect yours? Am I validated as heteronormative by you fitting my heteronormative picture, (and that can seem very important)? What trumps who, time and again. If my heteronormative picture isn’t that strong (as for Helen Boyd) it is less of a problem, but still there. So when does love become a decision, with a decision tree to help you get there (and yes, how and if you do sex is a box along the way)? Can I only be a non-lesbian woman in a partnership if you are not a woman?

The whole business of how much we choose to be what we are, regardless of who we are, is fraught. Serious crime and punishment? Dead easy, but now, perhaps, disturbing. Antisocial behaviour? Easy. Disability? A source of sympathy. Gender? Ah, now there you have me. Because I am not a woman, I am transgender, and even the most loving people can have a hard time deciding what I am and whether the who has changed and which was the main source of love. Congratulations to Chloe and Renee, Betty and Helen, and all those who have made it through, and most of all for sharing your stories, to keep us on our toes.

 

  • And as so often, I have a poem in sympathy with this thought: Hands

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