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It’s personal

  • Posted on July 31, 2012 at 10:09 pm

at workA few weeks ago, a handful of MPs stood up in the House and related their own struggles with mental illness. It’s something we don’t like to talk about. Partly it is because mental health and personality can seem inextricably related. Dementia takes the person out of the body we knew; depression makes happy people inaccessible to reassurance, comfort and love; strong people become fragile, and gentle people become angry. Obsessive compulsive disorders make other people perhaps even impossible to live with. Post-natal depression can make a loving mother hate her baby. However internal a physical ailment is, it is always external to the person. Mental illness seems to be internal to the person. It can seem to change the person. Does it? These are, if I am not being too presumptuous, common perceptions.

The MPs were dreadfully exposed by speaking their story, about how others responded to it – and in Parliament they knew they were being recorded verbatim in Hansard for posterity, and being broadcast. It hit the news. In full.

Today they returned to the news programme where they first featured, to record what had happened since that courageous moment. And they were happy. They felt released. Not cured, not different, just free, because they had stopped hiding something other people find really difficult to handle. In the process they had received many hundreds of supportive and grateful messages: emails and letters of gratitude that someone had spoken for them. The disclosures made the MPs seem very ordinary, family people, struggling with something that was not their fault, and which some, including their families, find very difficult to face.

It all reminded me of the nights I stood in front of the concert bands I play in, to announce to each in turn that I was really so much more a woman than I had ever been a man, that I would be presenting myself from that point on as female. People spoke of the courage of coming out, whilst I was just feeling the joy and release of not hiding any more. It is an extraordinary thing to do, to actually announce that you are different in a way that people can find distasteful or simply be unable to understand or come to terms with. Those of us who ever need to do it, know that it could be a release – or it could be a sentence. (These are just similarities, by the way, it is not that I am regarding gender dysphoria as a mental disorder in any way, for those who are celebrating the end of the GID diagnosis.) It is our risk, it is our story.

And it is intensely personal.

In being so personal, it also creates personal implications on everyone we are associated with. Everyone becomes ‘the one who is married to / son of / daughter of / friend of – the one who is different, and it therefore makes them different too. Whether it makes them the one who is ‘coping with a partner’s mental illness’, or the poor thing who is coping with a gender-transitioning partner (and who by implication must have made a terrible mistake somewhere along the line) we are like Midas who dare not touch what we value most. Should we not speak our stories because we implicate so many others around us? Should we retire and let others ask if we take sugar? Should we speak of how we think we are perceived, with the risk that we have misunderstood others’ misunderstanding of us? Or remain silent because we are stealing other people’s stories?

We speak of change. For mental illness, it may be a lifetime of OCD and the impact on others. For some with depression it is episodic. One day we are the parent or spouse or child who is the life and soul, the next suicidal, frightening. For gender transition, it is the coming out of what was always inside, into a changed presentation. Why did no-one know? They would have avoided us, might never have chosen us as friend, would almost certainly never have loved us.

For all of us who tell these extraordinarily daring personal stories, we are speaking of our selves. Not another person, not a morph into another person or personality. The heart that now bears the terrible inconveniences of OCD, of the impact of the depression, or that realises the joy of expressing a true gender, is the same. The soul, if that means anything to you, is the same.

The MP who remembered the day OCD fell down upon him and changed his life forever, the mother who fell into post-natal depression, or people like me who realise rather too late what it was that was wrong. Each of us is just one person, with one lifelong story to tell. But what we all do – you, me, every one of us – is interpret our world as it makes us, not as it is. If we speak of our understanding of how others see and respond to us, it is inevitably a tainted story, but in whatever voice (as my last blog) it is our story, not an indictment of anyone else. And we have the right to tell it with kindness – and that is all I try to do. My blog could be full of anger and blame, fury and tempest against people who cannot accept me as the same person, against the world. But it is not. I want to observe, to make sense, to understand, and to help others on similar journeys. If I fail, I fail, but at least I tried, in good faith.

And of course it is personal. Intensely personal. Because being a person is all we can do.

I want to invite all my readers to pause on this quote from Iris Murdoch, long enough for its truth to dawn:

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

This is the love I am looking to show. Or even to find. I want to be loved for completely who I am. Is that too personal?

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Who does she think she is?

  • Posted on July 29, 2012 at 12:31 pm
An acknowledgement; it may not be accurate, it is just my presumptuous imagination if you like, and told as a story. Yes, it is fiction. A collage of life, out of sequence.

How did she know what flowers I like?

And now she’s sitting there reading New Scientist like my husband used to. I don’t know what the Higgs boson is, but she does, and explained it to me as well as I could understand. The pink lilies are coming out in the fireplace, and she is slightly elegant in a long jade and navy dress, with butterfly ear studs to match the pattern and a lovely matching bracelet that even has jade butterflies in it. She has taste, and says she hardly has to try when it comes to clothes. Her eye shadow is just right for it too. My husband was never really interested in what he wore: greys and blues, without much thought from day to day. And now she compliments me, like he used to. I don’t feel the same about her. Should I try harder with my appearance? Or give up? Or simply not compare? I don’t know where she came from. She sort of turned up in my life and in my home, uninvited, as I saw less and less of my husband.

A bill arrived in the post this morning, addressed to Ms and Mrs. Something is missing. Not right. Part of me. Now she’s telling me how the International Olympic Committee has apparently got it all wrong about gender testing women athletes, and is asking again: ‘What is a woman? What is a man?’ I never had to even think about it. Now she wants me to. Needs me too. And I realise I don’t know either. We talk about all the many variations in gender markers. In the end I know I am a woman. A woman who used to have a man. She says she only knows what she is not.

We have both been to work today. Very different offices, in opposite directions, and we are both tired. She has a new job and welcomes the inclusion and being paid again. I’m lucky enough to have some extra days, so this month feels like it used to when I had a husband who always supported us financially. I think I would prefer it if she wasn’t making this all possible, and that I was the one with financial independence. Then I could say to her: ‘why are you here?’. My husband and I shared everything, always. Now she is sharing my dressing table, crowding me out. It doesn’t make be cross, it just feels too close, taking my space. But I know what I do best, so I head for the kitchen to make dinner and she goes to the computer. I always used to complain to my husband about that, but actually, I don’t want her in my kitchen all the time. Maybe I should jog her about the shed roof that needs re-felting. She promised. Instead I hear her getting the ironing board out. She does get cross about this, saying it doesn’t have to be my job. It’s funny, she does as much vacuuming and ironing as my husband used to. It’s time I set her a shared schedule on the loos and bathrooms, if she wants to live in my house. So long as she doesn’t ask me to mend the shoe cupboard next time. How did she know what to do? Ten minutes and it was back in use, even before it had time to get damaged. I would have asked a man.

We end up eating on our laps in front of the TV, and there’s a trailer for romance programmes for the autumn. People are kissing; soft focus and music to make it all emotionally inviting. It works. She’s looking away, and I know she is crying silently. I miss my husband. He wouldn’t have let me see him crying, even if he had been touched by things like this. He was sometimes, but he always hid it, like getting up to put the plates in the dishwasher. She is grieving something. So am I, but I am somehow angry inside because my husband was taken away and I don’t know where he is, only that he isn’t coming back. That, not the kissing on the TV, hurts. I was Mrs. I was his other half. I was the woman and he loved me like I loved him. I know he didn’t leave me for another woman, or for a man, or because he didn’t love me any more. I know what happened. I guess I understand why. But it isn’t fair, and I wasn’t given a choice. And I don’t have anyone to be angry with.

The evening is very quiet after that, so we get ready for the night, feeding cats, setting the dishwasher, pouring glasses of water, switching everything off and going upstairs. She always seems to know what needs to be done, how it needs to be done to be like it used to. I grab my nightdress and head for the bathroom. I don’t do naked in the bedroom any more. Not when she’s there. That is a right my husband had, but not her. She does naked though. And she reminds me of him still, so I don’t look. And then she comes to bed, wearing the same nightie he used to like to wear, for a while in his last year with me. She feels the same, but I don’t like to touch. She curls up ‘like a tiny beetle’ she says, right on the edge of the bed, facing away. She is frightened of my rejection. She wrote these last verses to a poem:

If it was a wind
with a ticket for a hope
and a promise in its lick
maybe
I would be carried
safely

but this is fear
blowing, just blowing
and I am hanging on
tight
being invisible
to air.

I think she is trying to show she is not taking my husband’s space, even though he isn’t coming back. I don’t want her in that space either. I’m not trying to be unkind. We’re both hurting and I need her to know that. She wants to fill that space. She never will. It would be wrong if she ever did.

I wake up and it is still early. Saturday, so no rush. I can hear slow classical music faintly below me. I know she is dancing, releasing all sorts of strains, in graceful movements reminiscent of the tai chi my husband started doing once. She will make tea, like he used to, and bring it up soon. I should have a shower to replace the long cuddles we used to enjoy on mornings like these. But she will be off out anyway, to play my husband’s old trumpet. She’s just as good. More relaxed maybe.

Breakfast. Saturday Live is on Radio 4 and something comes up that I remember from when I was first married. ‘Do you remember when the kids …?’ I begin. No. That was my husband. He would remember.

‘Yes’, she replies simply. ‘I was there. And you said …’

Who does she think she is?

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Just being

  • Posted on July 22, 2012 at 9:11 am

Fifty years ago I was just being me. I was too small to know there were choices and comparisons to be made. I stirred cakes and I helped mix cement, I pushed a straw-filled polar bear (this is before really cuddly toys!) and a bulldozer equally around the floor.

Forty years ago I was wondering why I was different, an outsider unable to break in. I was a teenager, and I guess a lot of teenagers have very mixed-up periods in their lives where finding their identity is based on culture, friends, media and family. Few are free enough to see things as they really are. I had long hair, a bright pink shirt and purple heather-cord trousers. And a lot of feelings and wishing about myself that I couldn’t tell anyone.

Thirty years ago I was in love, and in public ceremony, made commitments that I’d felt for a long time. I had found someone who made me feel alive and brave enough to be vulnerable with; someone who I didn’t feel so much an outsider with.

Twenty years ago we had children pushing cuddly toys and bulldozers around, and we were still making cakes and mixing cement. But I wasn’t the one making cakes; we had a well-organised division of labour that worked well. It was a sensible layer of complementarity and partnership.

Ten years ago I was starting to feel an outsider again. Maybe I mean an insider; inside I was wanting to just be me. The children were at a stage of not running up to me when I got home and my role was changing, and calling me to find myself again. ‘Being me’ meant art classes, then returning to music. The role was doing beautiful things and expressing myself, without a role or expectations. And I really began to come face to face again with feelings from forty years ago.

This year I came to terms with my decades, and with what it means to be myself, instinctively, in terms of how I live and understand what it means ‘to be’. I am living a normal life again, going to work nine to five, sharing housework, cutting the grass, mending stuff, doing the ironing, playing music in several bands. I don’t feel an outsider any more, but I’m doing all the same things, for all the same reasons and in all the same ways. Living, loving, doing, being.

This week I shall remember the decades, especially the thirty-year anniversary. I was a commitment I made for a reason I still hold. I didn’t make vows because I felt any absolute divine obligation, but because it was what I wanted, wholeheartedly to do. That was as close to being me as I felt about anything at the time. I still have the same heart, the same soul, and it feels no different. Am I not the same person? I shall leave that question open, because I read many discussions, and most are based on semantics of ‘person’ – does that mean the heart and soul, or the perceived human being shaped by roles, obligations, moods and emotions? I can’t answer that any better than you can, because we use words to mean what we mean, not what words inherently mean.

But thirty years ago there were two people, the same two as today, for all the external and experiential changes. Unfortunately one of them had gender dysphoria, and it had to be resolved. That has meant a revisit to love and commitment, and the basis for that. And on the anniversary day I shall bite my lip, go to work and live a normal day, because I can be nothing else than who I am, and nothing else would be better.

Sometimes, it is enough just to beSometimes, it is enough just to be.

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Food for love

  • Posted on July 1, 2012 at 8:04 am

How many words are there in the Inuit language, really, for snow? The myth is something like 400. But no, really there are no more terms than in English. [reference] It is a fond fancy that words separate things in degrees of sophistication, thus we evolve from ‘ug’ to: ‘that is very gracious of you, indeed generous, and I am grateful to avail myself of your munificence’ because we need to know what ‘ug’ really means. Maybe it’s the gruff acknowledgement of a morning cup of tea before we’re ready to be awake, maybe it’s the careful response to something that seems too good to be true, or the only thing a person can say after rescue from a fallen building. It needs interpreatation.

The state of snow does matter. Maybe not to me, but if I lived in it and with it all the time and my life depended on it, I would want to say a bit more than ‘it’s snowing!’. Words can over-prescribe, and words can lead us astray.

Words for love

It is as well known that in the New Testament, in the common Greek language of the time, there are four words for ‘love’. C S Lewis wrote a book in 1960 called The Four Loves, with his own Christian perspective on this, though of course they are not religious words in any sense, it’s just where most of us might come up against koine (common) Greek of the time. Are these any different from words we use, that are not translated into just one word in another language? The four terms are:

  • storge (pr. stor-gay), described as affection or fondness
  • philia, familial or friendship
  • eros, from which we derive erotic, including romance
  • agape (pr. a-ga-pay), meaning unconditional love

These are nouns, names for love relationships. Where are the verbs? That is where the problems begin linguistically.

We, in modern English, of course understate our love, because we fear to imply too much. ‘I love these biscuits’ is not the same as looking into another’s eyes and saying ‘I love you’. And when we make vows in marriage or promises in partnership, we do not mean unconditional love, any more than having sex because you both want it means a lifelong commitment! We have friends to whom we sign ‘love’ in an email, but are even cautious saying it out loud to a sibling. And there is as much power in saying the opposite. ‘I don’t love these biscuits’ means not terribly fond of them. But to say ‘I don’t love you’ is a warning, an assertion of a not-feeling. Thus to stop saying ‘I love you’ is a withdrawal that can leave just as powerful a message, and can say too much.

Muesli

And so it is that the word ‘love’ can mean anything or nothing, and we are afraid to use it, and when we do, afraid it means something different to the receiver, inviting something we do not want. Why are we afraid of the meanings of love? Are they as simple as four Greek roots? Do the words dictate what we can say or do or mean? Are they mutually exclusive terms? Of course not. I was musing on love described by analogy rather than semantics. What if we describe love of people differently (leaving biscuits out of it for a moment):

  • bread and water love: basic sustenance that keeps someone alive. We give it a lot, in many ways.
  • sugar love: high energy, fast-acting, exciting and with short effect. We give it in the moment, but don’t store it for long.
  • bagel love: we put a comforting ring around another and feed them, but we avoid the centre. Some personal space is reserved, but we recognise it is there.
  • muesli love: everything is in here, richness, variety, lasting nourishment, commitment to digesting it, and yet energy too. In a way it includes all the others.

Maybe you can think of more. But by analogies we avoid the false attachments of what we give to family, casual friends, ‘lovers’ and life partners. It also dissociates love from mode. You don’t have to see ‘sex’ in ‘eros’, or ‘tendencies’ in ‘~philia’.

Hung up on love

Love grows and love changes. We may start by offering bread and water, and see it develop into bagel love for a lifetime. We may be bagel people who comfort passing friends frequently and freely. Sugar love may be great to begin with and become less important as time goes by. Maybe your kind of muesli isn’t as sweet as mine, or needs a particular balance of fruit and nuts. For many people, what started with sugar love grows and matures into muesli love. Or bread and water starts to feel better with jam, or bagels that never connect with the middle become too inadequate an offering.

If you gave me four boxes, each containing one of those first Greek loves, and asked me to choose, I would want more than one from anyone who really shared my life deeply. If you countered my choice by saying, ‘Oh, sorry, I meant to say, girls can’t have that one’ I would feel hurt. Similarly, if one day you turned up with a choice of one instead of all, I would feel quite rejected: why stop saying you love me if you don’t mean something very significant? Well, we have all broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and this is what happens. Un-loving someone hurts, even at the bread and jam stage.

But if we thought of the analogies instead, would we explain ourselves better? If my muesli love, developed after many years through commitment and deep giving, had fewer nuts, that might be a better option than being downgraded to bagel love, whatever the filling. And by dissociating love from sex, might enable different kinds of intimacy, free from the guilt of our mental and social conditioning. Taking muesli off the shelf because it has ‘the wrong kind of nuts’ is a very radical thing to do, and bagels do leave a big hole in the middle.

Yes, my discussion is quite transparent, because it affects so many couples with long partnerships, where one has gender dysphoria. Their love may have become very rich over time, but because the gender nuts in the muesli love are wrong, over-dependency on sex-difference forces the whole pack from the shelf. Muesli love enables you, or empowers you, to say ‘I love you’. Bagel love is very cautious. ‘Love’ implies too much, and ‘I love you’ is withdrawn. ‘We can still be friends’ has been uttered so many times by girls and boys trying to break up nicely, and we all know it can be true; but really it means bread and water for you from now on.

It isn’t an argument or a persuasion, it is just what I experience in becoming forbidden to love and show love with muesli. I understand completely that being revealed as female means I would never have been chosen that way. My role was husband, it’s just that no-one noticed I was running in girls’ shoes. But I was chosen and, I hoped, chosen for myself, not just my nuts. The muesli love has been good. Why is it now so bad, having had decades to prove its value? Is it because a box marked ‘eros’ is forbidden between females? Why is it so feared or disliked? Did I not do eros sincerely? Why are the nuts now so bitter just because their true colour is revealed?

Most of us never have to face this. Life is simple when boys are boys and girls are girls, and eros has a very particular place. It becomes a base for intimacy, it becomes synonymous. For those of us in a less simplistic place, eros takes intimacy with it, muesli is off the shelf, and we are in a very lonely place – often for the rest of our lives. I just want love to be rich, unbound by the ‘serving suggestion’ on the outside that says it should be taken a particular way. I don’t want it to be all or nothing, based on my bits. I don’t want to throw away something very good, tested, proven over half a lifetime and sustaining, just because ‘I’m not the kind of girl who does that’. I want love not to be about sex, but about trust and vulnerability, where touch is genuine expression, not invasion of privacy, where the next kiss after ten thousand is meant and received the same as it always was. I want love to be something treasured because of what it has come to mean, because it is mature and rich. I want muesli, not two out of four boxes of Greek love. I want to be loved for myself, not my nuts.

And I want to be able to offer my bowl of muesli as welcome nourishment too, not to find it is always ‘the wrong sort’.

 

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Quite ordinary really

  • Posted on June 7, 2012 at 7:01 am

Being normal is such a strange thing. We all think we’re normal until someone defines it in a way that leaves us ever so slightly outside, and we’re tempted to shift a bit to nudge ourselves in. And then life throws something at you that makes you so very not normal in the way most others describe, and all that goes out the window. It’s a bit like severe stress reactions; people behave in very strange ways out of self preservation, fear, trauma, and yet all they are doing is reacting very normally to very abnormal situations. Or one day you finally wake up to the fact that the gender everyone else has given you all your life isn’t right, and you start living differently. So many people think it just isn’t normal, because they have known you as something else for a long time.

And then they sit down with you, share a coffee and talk about all the things you always have talked about, and they realise that you are still the same. You’ve adjusted your appearance, made some changes and planned a few more. A few weeks ago they would have been talking to a man (apparently) and now they’re talking to a woman, who is offering the same responses, thoughtfulness and kindnesses, and, well – it’s still you, and you are so comfortable and natural, even more peaceful and happy in yourself. You have become normal. A bit unusual in making this kind of change perhaps, but normal.

It’s this ordinariness that strikes many trans* people too. We don’t choose our clothes for any reason other than that they feel the most appropriate. We don’t set about a very protracted and in places very painful and uncomfortable, expensive and difficult journey for fun. We do it because it makes us ordinary and normal in the way that feels most right. There’s a lot to learn of course, and this takes us places we have never been before. It shoves us up against some things we may rather not know about. We rub shoulders with people who have quite different issues and get confused with fetishists and thought of as practitioners of weird and strange sexual practices. Some think we are to be feared and present a threat to children – or just normality. And all we feel as we find ourselves, is ordinary.

To begin with, coming out and telling people this extraordinary thing, that we are going to live the rest of our lives differently gendered from before, is very challenging. Whether workplaces, social environments, close family or wherever, most people haven’t a clue what it’s all about, so there are adjustments we want to steer and get right. And that certainly makes life complicated. Some will never accept ‘our story’ and we have to accept that. We lose people and we gain people, some lose jobs, homes and everything. And if we survive that, and our personal emotional response to the challenges, we chase the surf over the reef and find ourselves in a wonderful lagoon. The storms are past and we survey our rigging and assess the damage.

But it is calm, because we are in the only place we can be safe and at rest. Some of the crew may have jumped ship, but now it’s time for the carpenters to fix things, the cooks to get breakfast, the navigator to get the maps out, and you, the captain to take charge. It is ordinary. It is normal. There are losses, but the ship is where it is meant to be.

I have had people remark to me how natural I am like this (and long before I finally let go fully, too). I have had trans* people ask why they feel so ordinary going to work, doing a job, living an ordinary life, after all the trauma of gender change. I guess it is because the old ideas of normality were only other people’s guesses anyway, and breaking them simply showed how false they really were. Why did it all have to be such a big deal? Well, some people just wanted us the way we were and don’t want us the way we are now. We have maybe upset too many applecarts – or they were into our apples and now we’re offering pears. I can’t help that, but it is very galling when your fruit is good but it’s just the wrong shape. But in the end all we were after was being ordinary and normal in an unusual way.

It isn’t easy of course; we get very hurt in the process. We learn things most people never have to think about, and I suppose we feel a bit ‘special’ or unique – not that anyone would choose this path given the choice of the easier, unquestioning, understanding of gender.

My closest family is very normal, and like with any trauma, their responses are all normal. One shows complete, silent denial and rejection; one is familiar and accepting; another understands it completely and simply doesn’t want it. All entirely normal, all very ordinary in a tale told a million times in the lives of trans* people like me.

I wrote of courage earlier, and how I disowned the idea when people ’admired my courage’ in coming out. Now I realise the courage isn’t in the change or the exposure, it’s in the ordinariness. It is in the daily rejection in your own home, it is in suddenly becoming the inappropriate lover after ten thousand days of being the appropriate lover. It is in learning where not to touch, in learning not to be kissed, in learning to be out there alone once more. It is in knowing you are the cause of so much grief and cannot do a thing about it, except to carry on being your same loving, kind self, and simply accept it. Grief too is a very ordinary thing.

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