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A normal transgender person

  • Posted on February 8, 2012 at 10:32 am

I have left a poem Front Page News that is part of this story. It came about after the Metro newspaper landed on commuters in and around London in September 2011, juxtaposing two headlines:

‘The £1 million man from Atlantis. Walliams completes his torturous Thames odyssey … and raises a fortune for charity in the process’

– and

‘Boy, 10, who went back to school a girl’.

It made me think: why is it so normal to swim the Thames, and why does it make you such a hero, compared with a 10-year-old who braves the opprobrium of parents, friends, family (and, under headlines now, the world) and causes a sensation? Most real heroes, when asked, say that their act was not a matter of choice, but instinct, so you judge who is most heroic here. It felt such an irony to see these two together, and quite sad too.

Since then several children have made headlines, and with immense bravery shared by their parents, have pressed forward the case for transgender identity to be normal. Not just normal, but acceptable; beyond sensational headlines, beyond despicable use of words that make trans people different, reviled or just a subject of ridicule. This has been the most difficult year of my life. It’s odd that for fifty years I have struggled with not feeling normal, and now I feel completely normal, I struggle with a society that says I have become abnormal. So I applaud organisations like Trans Media Watch who tackle the prejudice, deliberate sensationalising, or even the sheer thoughtlessness and ignorance, of journalists and editors everywhere. I wish I was one of them: I wish I was up there at the front being bolshie and noisy about being normal, and making others like me a bit safer and more accepted.

So I admire these children and their families for risking so much to be seen, to be listened to on their own terms. I know who is the heroine in the headlines.

Normal?

I immediately know that the statisticians among you will say that normal has a definite meaning: the majority group in the middle of the bell curve of variance. What I mean by normal is that ‘this happens: rather a lot more than most of us know’ and that as a result, being trans is an everyday part of diversity. There are many places you can read up the stats on transgender people, intersex incidence etc., if you haven’t, just be aware that you will likely have met, maybe know, people whose transgender identity, past or present, simply isn’t apparent to you. Part of the reason for this is that it can be so difficult to reveal or fulfill a transgender personality. By doing so, you make a statement that still shocks, that so runs counter to preconceptions it tears families apart. There is no blame, there is no cause: it just happens, and because we don’t accept it as normal we have to set it apart, in case it’s dangerous or subversive.

If we all accept that there is a bit of the feminine in all men, and a bit of the masculine in all women, we are inevitably faced with the question: ‘yes, but how much’? And how much is ‘too much’? Too much for what? Our personal gender security? Even if it could be properly measured, how could we ever determine a maximum percentage for a definition of normal?

So as I watch, support, and follow the children who recently have made the front pages and the breakfast TV, my heart is with them. I wish I had known at an early age that there is a language for this, a space in life and society, and that it’s OK: you can be loved, you can express who you are and you can live a normal life. Meanwhile, I am still up against the buffers, where people can choose to be associated with me or not, on grounds of my kind or normality (‘Don’t let anyone think I’m the kind of person who finds this normal’!).

I can’t walk away from being transgender, but they can. If they can only feel safely normal by distancing themselves, they will. I am a normal transgender person – why do you feel your personal sense of gender is so betrayed? I hope these children work a miracle in the popular mind, until one day there is no media sensation, no permissible transphobia, and it is perfectly normal to love, be seen with, be a parent – as a transgender person.

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Front page news

  • Posted on February 8, 2012 at 9:22 am

David Walliams swam 140 miles up the Thames for sports charity in September 2011. He did in fact save a dog on his way. The articles appeared in The Metro on September 13.

On the day a man swims the Thames
and raises a million for all those miles,
a boy, 10, goes back to school a girl.
Together, they are front page news on every seat
on trains in and out of London today.

And tomorrow, one will have a bath
and be glad he’s going nowhere except
to a fluffy embrace, be dry, warm – and will
reminisce about the day he also saved a dog,
and talk, and tell and forever be – the man
who swam the Thames.

The other has plunged into a turbulence –
white water with only his body board, and miles
ahead, so many miles, and his alone to leave behind,
in swirling judgement of parents unwilling to see
the reach of an unfamiliar stroke, of a girl
in a class of her own.

One page – picked up, picked over, passport of a morning
and tired but persistent on the journey home –
carries its stories to three million hands (and a million
pounds for the courage in a river no surprise) –
but the courage of a daughter born a boy?

Reported ignorance, condemnation, shock and taunts –
protests at ‘lack of consultation’ by the school
reflected in uncharitable commuter chat and chafe –
and the prayers of many quiet knowing hearts in stations
everywhere, who have travelled home this way before.

2011 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Jerusalem

  • Posted on February 4, 2012 at 8:08 pm
This one is about living a dual-gender life, where you can’t always live in your authentic gender, but out of love and compassion revert to what is comfortable for another for a while. This is what it can feel like to take yourself apart.

Peace and Jerusalem come to mind –
the hair a bowl in my hands
cooling, and laying to rest while
still filled with my thoughts – my
heart sinking to the floor with my
skirts and the rose-framed spectacles
on the bed now framing down-cast earrings,
bracelets, beads, small-time watch.

Cotton pads become my face, but
all smudged, blurred and blended,
all lips and eyes, the foundation
of an abstract, discarded and limp –
while a man’s face examines me
from the bathroom mirror, tells me
the bra must go with its silicone
bounty for a plain, striped shirt.

The unheard ticking under the
pink face behind the rose-framed
lenses the shape of eyes, oversees the
truce of the refugee woman who does not
exist outside her timeframe, placed
as she is in a holy time that is not
Jerusalem except that it is contested behind
a wailing wall with prayers for peace.

And for the sake of peace she is in
retreat, falling to pieces, shedding to
lighten the burden as she flees away
to secrets, first spread in colours on the
bed where she cannot rest, then folded
gathered, rolled and ark-ived wholly
without covenant or promise except my
benediction: you shall never be denied.

2011 © Andie Davidson

From the new collection Realisations.

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Riddle

  • Posted on February 3, 2012 at 6:23 pm

They are as old as entertainment, perhaps as old as the camp-fire. A riddle is a mental puzzle starting with several usually contradictory statements, ending: ‘what am I?’

And by golly being transgender is confusing to people! What am I?

‘You used to be a …’ is perfectly understandable and so completely wrong! No, I never was! How can I explain that feeling of looking around at other men and thinking: ‘well, I know I’m not one of those!’? It follows that it is just as hard to understand, when what I say is that I am a transgender person. Not a man, not a woman; a transgender person.

‘No, no, no! you have to be one or the other!’

I do know how it is for those who have a strong binary view of gender, and feel they have the wrong body and want the other kind. I can understand that. Reassignment or corrective surgery and hormone treatment changes their physical attributes and takes away the pain of inhabiting a body with the wrong parts. I just know that this is not quite me.

I am transgender. I always shall be. I am most comfortable when dressed as a woman and at peace with myself. It says nothing about my sexual orientation (and that is my business anyway, so it isn’t your right to ask – the answer is confusing too, probably.) You, dear observer, may be uncomfortable with this. Why am I wearing women’s clothes? I am not a transvestite: the layer between my soul and my clothes just happens to look different to how I feel about myself. So please listen carefully to this: my body was shaped by hormones from before I was born; my mind was not, and possibly not the physiology of my brain. So when I put on shirt and trousers, I am transgender – but dressed as a man. So today I am transgender and dressed as a woman.

I am not my clothes, and I am not my body, but I am a person – and I am not the problem either. The real riddle is that we ever managed to believe gender was as simple as male and female. That’s just how babies are made.

How I am challenges you though, doesn’t it? I confuse. I become a riddle for which you don’t have an answer, and when I give it, it still makes no sense. Well, all that means is that we all have a lot to learn. All I ask is that you appreciate that the riddle will only make sense when you understand what I am not.

Ah! yes! I get it now. I am a man, she is a woman and you are transgender.

What do we like about riddles? I think it’s that we feel really bright when we get the answer first, but don’t feel totally stupid when we don’t, because suddenly we realise something new. Discovering life riddles should add to the fun and variety, not be a source of ridicule, fear and hatred. So please, try to appreciate this riddle and accept. I am transgender.

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Honesty

  • Posted on January 30, 2012 at 6:47 pm

I could start by asking ‘What is truth?’

When you find yourself on the outside of some social niche, looking in, knowing that everyone else thinks you belong, and you don’t, you question very deeply: is something wrong with me? Or is something wrong with the available range of places I could fit? The given ‘truth’ about gender is that there are two, and from these arise sexuality. So you are male or you are female and yes you may also be lesbian, gay or bi.

That’s interesting. We are still so sure about male and female, but allow all sorts of variation in how a person of a particular gender interacts sexually? Our concept of gender is terribly, grievously, outdated.

Just to ensure my position is credible, remember that perhaps four per cent of births give rise to some ambiguity about assigning gender. Most of the time it is perfectly clear: ‘It’s a boy/girl!’ But sometimes it isn’t. We call this condition intersex. That, in our society is unacceptable: the birth certificate awaits and the baby will be assigned for life. Some corrective surgery may be decided on, maybe a decision about gender socialisation. For an unlucky few, their assigned gender subsequently changes with puberty as hormones do or do not kick in as expected. For others, their gender is never, ever resolved.

That’s interesting too. At the coalface, midwives and clinicians know that physiology isn’t always as clear as we would like. Why is this covered over so much? Why is it so important to be either 100 per cent male or 100 per cent female, when we know it just isn’t true?

Here isn’t the space for the full description of those few genes and their positions and activity that make life complicated, nor about how we all start female and develop according to maternal hormones as well as our own. Suffice it to say, the variations in gender are many. Recent work on brain scans shows the typical gender balance of grey and white matter – and that the great majority of people who fundamentally question their gender, have good grounds for doing so: their brain does not entirely agree with the rest of their bodies. So you thought you knew you were 100 per cent male or female? Probably no-one is. So why do we accept a little bit of female in a man and a little bit of male in a woman, but not a lot? What about a 50/50 person, or a man who is more female in the inside?

Back to the top: what is truth? When it comes to gender, the truth is that we are not polarised into the male/female binary description very well at all. Oh dear me …

Tell me about honesty, then.

Honesty must be telling the truth as you know it, and not hiding it. OK: I am transgender. That is my honesty. But what about everything I said and did as a man for over 50 years? Where was the honesty in that? I covered over things I felt, and I didn’t always come clean and I suppose I therefore wasn’t even honest about being male. Well, not all male anyway. The trouble is, I didn’t have access to the truth and lacked a language to describe how I felt about myself. But I do now, and I have to live with knowing things that most people do not. As I learned the truth and it dawned on me that all was not well in man-land, I hid things, physically and mentally, from myself and my wife and from friends. The consequences of the truth and being honest can be very hard to bear, just as the consequences of being secretive, hiding, or in denial.

Here is another uncomfortable truth then: I am transgender and I am still the same person who was a romantic young man a long time ago. That’s hard to grasp too: how can I be? I look like a woman a lot of the time now, and that is how I feel most comfortable. And yet my sexual orientation has not changed one bit. Our inability to embrace the truth of gender in the same way that we have accepted natural diversity in sexuality, shows that we are powerfully conditioned. Deep inside we all harbour at least a bit of homophobia and rather a lot of transphobia (that’s fear, not hate, in this context) – because all these things challenge those aspects of social order based on having to be a man or a woman. And for most of us, that identity and our sexual inclination determine not just who we are attracted to, but who we feel we must not. What we feel about our gender also sets up roadblocks to keep us on our own straight and narrow (oh, so important, to feel ‘normal’!).

So you live with or are married to a transgender person? Coming out changes you more than it changes them. They stop questioning themselves, and you start questioning yourself. Their honesty makes you suddenly the partner/husband/wife of a transgender person. Can you take that label? Explain it, and defend it? The best relationship in the world, based on honesty and love, now falls down to the personal comparison with social norms and acceptability: what others think of you, and what you think of yourself. Is it OK to learn a new language of romance (even of sex) with a transgender partner? In what way will they disappoint? I do accept entirely that gender reassignment surgery is the ultimate challenge, don’t get me wrong. But it does reveal how much our love of another is an expression of personal attraction and self-reflection, rather than the meeting of souls that might be our ideal. So tell me about your love: and maybe I can dare to be honest and trust I haven’t just blown it away.

Now then; can you understand why I need to talk about honesty? How can I be honest with you and explain that my honesty has been emergent? Am I being most dishonest if I turn up as a man, or as a woman? Is my honesty tempered by the kind of reception I am likely to get? Tell me what you think, and why, when I arrive in a skirt and blouse, prosthetic breasts and a wig. Honestly. Let’s talk about it – so long as I can ask you any question back about you too. And I shall be honest with you about truths you don’t yet know. And if you still think that I am in disguise, or mentally disturbed, or just plain weird, I have to say I am just being honest.

And honesty in being transgender can sometimes be very confusing, until we really listen to it.

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