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Bloody complicated!

  • Posted on February 22, 2014 at 8:43 am

I want to move into talking about personal relationships on this blog, for several reasons. One is that this is the area most fraught with difficulties for trans people. During transition many of us feel our lives are too baffling for others to deal with, we ourselves are dealing with a liberation as well as a transformation, being the same, but being different to everyone else. It is a time of life-on-hold, and everything takes too long. And it’s lonely. Another reason is that others need to understand that relating to us need not be confusing, that the confusion isn’t in us, but in them too. Cis people need to learn that trans people are as loving and feeling as they are, not strange and to be distanced. A third reason is that relationships are like confetti thrown to the wind, and lots of questions are raised that we prefer not to have to examine anyway.

Hearts are broken all the time. Human beings change their preferences: someone turns up who is more attractive, more sexy, more exciting, reinvigorating. Your partner seems boring, inattentive, disinterested in you. Your significant other thinks it’s OK to have sex with someone else, you do not. You meet a soulmate while either or both of you are in a long-term relationship. What do you do? Stuff happens, people are hurt.

‘If only I’d got it right first time’, many would say. ‘Now I’m lumbered or I leave.’

I am old-fashioned. Yes, really. I took lifelong commitment seriously, I only had sex with the person I married, and I stuck with it – out of love as it happens, for over 30 years. And yet I too got hurt.

Fixed or fluid?

Of course I understand. Your sexuality is as likely in your genes as is your gender. It is a fixed identity, isn’t it? The truth is, I just don’t know. Don’t ask me! I used to say just that, when people asked my opinion ‘from a man’s point of view’. I still say it. When you have lived as I have, in both binary camps, nothing is clear cut any more. Everyone I knew was happy with me living ‘as a man’, thoroughly convinced, and enough were finding me desirable. They knew what I was; only they didn’t. I know enough older women who have taken to female partners after marriage, to know that sexuality is a bit more fluid than we would like to believe.

I, like many trans* people, wonder what my life would have been like, if when I started to realise I wasn’t like other boys, I had been free to be one of the other kinds in a wholly accepted way. What if I had been a desirable person and partner, not for appearing to be a man? What if I had entered marriage as I really was? What if I’d never had to be binary?

And what now? I have made, and experienced, such changes, and met such a wide variety of people, that I feel there is a fluidity in all of us, surrounded with sea walls so strong that the tides change nothing. Take away the social sea walls, and I suspect there would be a lot more freedom of expression in both gender and sexuality than we see.

But then you can’t ask me, because I cannot unsee what you may never have seen, and my view of the world is very different from that of the average cis hetero person, who simply doesn’t need to go beyond a binary view of life that fits adequately. I can no longer see the world as you do; it has changed dramatically. Would you like to see the world as I do? Or is it just fine enough to see it as it is to you?

Maybe we ask too much that you should stand in our shoes, even walk a mile in them too. I mean, why should you? Is it scary, to open up the possibilities? And why does it matter?

Relationships make us what we want to be

Relationships are complex things, begun, fostered and ended for many reasons. But all along we compromise hugely in order to create them; we need them. The trouble is, we find it easier to see a relationship in terms of what it gives us, than in the balance of what we can also give. Relationships help to make us what we want to be. They are props and acquisitions in many ways.

That sounds selfish doesn’t it? I think it probably is. And it means that not all relationships are right, to be maintained at all costs, because to be fair and creative and productive, they do need to be fully reciprocal. An article in The Guardian newspaper recently remarked that modern marriages are for more than food on the table and a shared roof: they are to enable us to explore ourselves and grow as people. Now that is scary. What if your dream girl or hunk (or lovely sensitive man) does grow, expand, develop and become more real? Is that what you want? Your dream girl has a brilliant career that brings here a strong social standing of her own, or your sensitive man ‘becomes’ a woman, or androgynous, or queer? Does that leave you dispossessed, as with a gadget that no longer works? (Is it still under guarantee? Can I take it back?)

So you bought the pepper mill that doesn’t grind too well, and you see the one that (at least when new) works a lot better for you …

We all have choices, and they are our own. We can see relationships in many ways. I’m not saying that we should not be honestly utilitarian, only that we should be honest. So here’s an everyday conundrum: two married people meet and fall in love. They want commitment, and feel that being together is where they should have been from the beginning. Which of them wants to be committed to another who plainly is (now) not committed, but ready to have an affair, even split and join them? I married you because you cheated (with me) … can I trust you, or are we simply agreed that we are happy cheaters together?

It’s funny how love can make you think more flexibly. If you want to. I just want to invite you to think about what you love, as well as who, in a relationship, and which matters most? And when you have decided that, whether you are prepared to say that to each other. Understand what you mean by ‘love’ and be clear that it is conditional. And be content that you can expect nothing better in return.

Is your kind of love a deal, or do you want something deeper?

Next: What to do with a trans* partner

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Ex-communication and divorce

  • Posted on February 1, 2014 at 8:38 am

This week, nearly three weeks after the fact, I received a letter. I was already divorced and hadn’t known it. I had even written of it prospectively when it had already happened. What a strange thing. Everyone talks about divorce, some with bitter thankfulness, including those with several to their name, but this one is ‘mine’. And yet I still don’t want to own it. It was handed to me, and at the time of initiation it was a requirement, without which I could not be fully documented with a gender recognition certificate.

It wasn’t so much a door closing as standing in front of an already closed door and hearing the footsteps die away on the other side. Is there any reason any more to communicate? My ex (no longer just my PSO – previously significant other), had always said there was no reason not to be friends again, but so far has remained cold and distant. I don’t yet fully appreciate that I was never truly loved simply for myself, despite countless thousands of moments of intimacy and expressions of love. I was not my body, nor am I now. She does not yet fully appreciate that the person she loved was always a woman, and that my body was everything, my soul nothing. It’s not a criticism; it’s normal. I perceive coldness; love-amnesia. She perceives anger and resentment, not grief and profound disappointment.

Excommunication has happened. Ex-communication has not.

Excommunication

It is three years ago that I was preparing to leave my last job under redundancy terms. If I had known then how things would be now, I might have been less able to make this change. I am glad I did not know. I’ve got some things right and some things wrong. I’ve been a difficult friend to some and a novelty or curiosity to many. Of the people I’ve encountered in these three years, most will never have knowingly met a transsexual woman until me. I have learned, they have learned. Those unwilling to communicate or get close, those who have excommunicated me (or themselves) have been afraid that knowing me, being associated with me, or loving me, would change them, making them as socially anomalous as they perceive me to be. But just as I have written several times here, whilst our appearance and attitudes can change, we all remain the same people throughout life events. Some of us face this and dismiss our fears, others face the fear and close the door on opportunities to grow or embrace new life.

I regret ‘my’ divorce enormously. I thought love and commitment were forever and I was wrong (yes, W H Auden’s Stop all the clocks is very resonant for me). I am still adjusting my understanding of love, and realising how terribly lonely this life is if souls don’t meet.

And so I have often wondered why gender has to be everything in a love relationship. I am in the very vast majority in losing my marriage, and happy as I am for every one that holds together, it hurts that mine didn’t. Would better counseling for families and partners make any difference? There is even less support for them than there is for us, but I’m not sure whether it would help anyway. We both read the books, life stories, academic research, and all the rest. My ex was a trained counselor, and we spent a fortune and many hours in deep therapy together. None of this made any difference. Was I just hoping it would ‘change her mind’? Maybe I was, but above all I wanted her simply to see that I was just me, and that as a person I was just the same, and just as worth being close to, committed to and supported by. As being loved by.

I guess that is the hurt. You are a woman? I cannot love a woman. You always were a woman? I never really loved you at all, then, only what I thought you were. You will find someone else, just don’t expect it to be me. Yes, that hurts.

Divorce

Divorce in this context is annulment. It is finding your heavily-insured Rembrandt is a worthless copy. It isn’t ‘I don’t love you anymore’ so much as ‘If I’d known, I never would.’ I feel that my love and my love-worthiness has been completely devalued and become worthless, empty. I still have my love for her, but it is like coinage for Samarkand in my pocket.

As I run my fingers through my now lovely hair, and feel how thin it is on top, I wonder how it could have been if I had grown up in a world that had acknowledged transsexuality when I needed it. I feel caught in the nick of time in several ways.

And then I recall one of my psychiatrists ending the session with: ‘And are you happy?’ My spontaneous response was: ‘If I’d known I was allowed to be this happy, I would have done this a long time ago.’ So do I regret loving someone as I have, and raising a family, and being ‘father’ in my own way? No, I don’t. What I really wish is that all of us had been aware of transsexuality and understood that it doesn’t make the person, it just makes them a different configuration from cissexuality. I wish that we had all understood that what makes a family, that what makes for loving, committed relationships is not perceived gender but a wealth of much deeper things.

This, then, is a turning point for me. There is no longer any need to communicate with my ex. We may, we may not, but it isn’t up to me any more. A final statement on her love has been made, underlined, and presented with an official red stamp in the corner. This is the reality of being born transsexual.

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Be

  • Posted on January 4, 2014 at 10:18 pm

Sometimes (I wrote under a photo of a single swan) it is enough just to be.

That was over 30 years ago, a gift with love. Just a few years earlier, I gained a lifetime favourite song, ‘Be’ from the film Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. By now I was grown up, so the question of ‘What do you want to be?’ was getting a bit passée.

Being and doing

It’s interesting to think about the relationship between being and doing, Socrates thought so (to be is to do), as did Plato (to do is to be). And no, it’s not the Sinatra joke (do-be-do). Can you do anything without being? Can you be anything unless you express it by doing? I think the difference is that you can suppress actions that you feel would be natural, if only you felt free and accepted, and you can do things that aren’t natural in order to appear to be something you are not. And you can also make a show of doing something that expresses your being, as if it were exceptional, in order to seek permission to be.

I’ve read people who write about ‘doing’ trans* or queer, perhaps because they feel their sense of being is not resolved by pigeon-holing themselves, or because it is a stage in exploration: can they really be different? Can it really be that they are different?

I remember a quite distinct period of ‘doing’, of pushing the envelope, of seeing what fitted, what would happen, where it would lead. At first it was what I very much wanted to do, and felt very like expressing something I was, but felt a bit awkward simply because it was different. And there was also an element of wanting to be noticed. It was a real nuisance and disappointment after a day of ‘doing’ female to remove the nail varnish, but it was also a good reason to leave it on so it would be noticed. If it had really felt out of place with my being, I would have wanted to remove it. I didn’t. I wanted what I was to be seen by what I did. And I started to make more and more things noticeable, because I was desperate to be known for what I was, by having to explain things I was doing. I think it is a very common thing.

Doing and permission

But it isn’t just about being trans* or queer, or anything do do with sex or gender. It’s about our freedoms do be ourselves, to make life something of being, not of doing.

I remember ten years ago and more screaming out inside because I was in constant demand, but only for what I could do, not simply for what I was (as a whole person). And that was before I even began to understand my gender struggles. I wrote a poem at the time that expressed my life as being like a cairn, a way-marker. Everyone passing by was placing another small stone, making me useful, adding to my layers, my reason to be there for them. Whereas what I wanted most of all was to have bits of me taken, loved, valued, to add to their lives, their sense of being. It was a very powerful period in my life, and, looking back, a beginning of inner change that enable me eventually to find the freedom to not have to do, but to be.

Sometimes it is enough just to be? No. It is always enough just to be.

Doing as a free expression of being is not conscious doing, it is what others see as a result of you simply being. You don’t make it up, you don’t have to make it visible in order to gain permission to be yourself.

Tied in knots

Last night I was talking with a friend who had had one of those difficult family Christmases. Physically, she was literally tied in knots as a result. Unable simply to be in that company, she had done as much as she could to accommodate herself in the situation, and had come away with needing to do the right things to release herself from the knots: ‘I’ve got to get rid of all this contraction first!’ – and she had a method in mind, difficult, but sure to be effective.

I remembered this time last year, writing several times about letting go of a marriage, a love, something deeply attached. I was an orang-utan mother carrying a dead baby, being mother when mother was no longer the reality. And in the end, after too long, I realised it wasn’t just grieving, it wasn’t difficult in itself, I just had to know I was allowed to let go. No special technique, no esoteric method, no effort or strength – just to put down what I didn’t have to carry. If I didn’t want to.

I reminded myself and my friend that a simple fact of life is that we don’t owe anyone anything, and no-one owes us anything. We are born to parents because that is the only way in. We mostly grow up in a family, because mostly parents or carers feel our nurture is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t put us in debt, it just teaches us to do likewise or better. There is no debt system hanging over us. If we choose to be kind, to love, to be generous, to be free, then we can be. Can you think of anything better? Not out of indebtedness, but out of an expression of self.

This is doing as an expression of being. Not doing to see if we can be ourselves, or dare to be ourselves, or are acceptable as ourselves.

What helps us best to express our being? If we want to do that, the rest follows.

It isn’t a resolution for 2014, it’s a revolution.

Just be. Oh, and let others be who they are, not what you want or need them to be. Love them as they are. Some may love you as you are too, especially if all your doing is a free expression of your being.

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Truth and reconciliation

  • Posted on December 7, 2013 at 10:26 pm

The whole world learned this week of the death of Nelson Mandela. I’ve heard and read a lot of opinion, recollection, reflection and analysis over the last few days, some seeking balance about a man who refused to renounce violence. But no-one can refute or deny that here was a man who changed the world. It wasn’t just his incomparable role in dismantling apartheid, nor his fortitude through 27 years in prison, rather it was his ability to seek reconciliation rather than revenge, and working together rather than division. He became the paradigm for truth and reconciliation, to be used as a model elsewhere and into the future.

Beyond politics, beyond nations, there is a principle in truth and reconciliation that was unique at the time, but which speaks in many situations now.

I tried writing a letter. I rewrote it. I asked myself how much I was writing for myself, and how much for the recipient. My expression of care and concern: was it because I wanted to be heard, or because there was something that did need to be said? Was it my place to speak? Or even be concerned? Was it more my seeking to be understood, or genuinely to help the other, where understanding might be helpful?

It was quite a quandary, and in the end the letter went into the recycling. I wasn’t sure about the motive, and in the end it became a much reflected-upon telephone conversation. It was, I felt, much-needed communication with my almost-ex wife who, I felt, has not really worked much out in a deep way about my transition. I shall never know what it is like to be faced with having an unexpectedly transsexual spouse. She will never know what it’s like to face up to being transsexual. Between us we have very deep questionings about the nature of love and the role of the body in showing and sharing love. Some find it easy, some impossible, some in-between. I guess that’s us.

Truth

I guess we both know the truth as we see it. I feel utterly rejected and betrayed because the worst I did was understand the way I was born and adjust to it. The best I did was to love in the same way as always and hope to continue. But what was forced upon me was the deepest and most honest assessment of my identity, my self, my expression of life itself, and I fell into place, looking and sounding somewhat different from the husband-as-was. I shed fear and self-hatred but gained the agony of losing the love of my life.

She was never rejected, nor her love, but must have felt my rejection of the male role that defined her role, quite keenly. It’s not really for me to say on her behalf. I do know that my female presence felt competitive rather than complementary, and must have challenged her sexuality. But she was not obliged to dig as deep, as I was, into her furthest recesses, and I expect has surfed the loss in order to keep going. Don’t we all do that much of the time? Yes, it’s easy to over-analyse, but it’s also a lot easier to cope with things by skating lightly on thin ice, hoping to get to the other side.

We each have truths to face full-on, if we are to remain balanced people. Mine is to recognise that even the most in-loveness and commitment does not signify unconditinal love. I have to accept that the reality of human love truly can be entirely contingent and dependent on being what’s needed. Yes, I was to a sufficient degree wanted for my body more than my loving, for my means more than my self.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for me to chew on.

Her truth is that if indeed I was born female with male body bits, as per my complete clinical diagnosis, then she was married for over 30 years to a woman. That neither of us knew this possibility is immaterial. The truth is that I have not become a woman, I am just a woman who is finally aligning her way of life and body to what she is.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for her to chew on.

Isn’t truth a difficult thing sometimes? It won’t go away by not thinking about it, or by making excuses for prior beliefs, and the best thing you can do with it is to speak to it, voice it and embrace it. We have to change to fit the truth, because it won’t change to fit us.

So why am I blogging this? Isn’t it just a tad unfair to be the one who always writes, and about pretty personal stuff? These dialogues are very one-sided when I write them out, and maybe I am inventing what my wife is really thinking, presumptuously and unfairly. I don’t know, because she hasn’t expressed these things as I have. All I can do is try my best to imagine what it must be like (see also, from earlier days: Who does she think she is?).

And that worries me on her behalf, and I know that she will be no more alone as a spouse/partner of a transsexual person, than I was as an emerging transsexual person myself. For every one of us who is married, there is a spouse coming to terms. As transsexual people, we get to know each other, go for diagnosis and resolution. They have little or no real support or help, no reason to meet, and have less to invest than we do. They can walk away and rationalise it as they wish. We can’t, and that makes it different.

And yet we reach a truth that makes sense. We are leaving fear, self-hate and denial, and finding self-love and acceptance. They may never do that, and rather find themselves feeling diminished, self-doubting and fearful, or in denial.

That’s why I write – to observe and present these difficulties as issues to properly resolve rather than avoid.

Reconciliation

I have sent over-long texts, emails and letters. I have been overwhelming in my self-explanation and insistence that I, myself, me, am still here. That what is in my head and my heart, my soul – is unchanged. More openly understood and expressed maybe, but not different. Don’t I deserve to be loved for myself?

I try to be honest about my motivations, but yes, I have often written just hoping for a touch of that old love, affection and partnership. Wrong fishing line, wrong hook, wrong bait. Truth must precede reconciliation.

So what is reconciliation? It means no more nor less than bringing together again. I don’t expect anything more than friendship, but it does imply acceptance of truth and being able to step beyond old understandings and beliefs into a shared space.

And divorce? Isn’t that about irreconcilable differences? Or is that also about unwillingness to face truths? Our grounds, for pragmatic reasons of a gender recognition certificate, had to be those awful declarations about my unreasonable behaviour in wearing women’s shoes (among other things) and being seen in public!

No, somewhere beyond all that crap, I hope that there may still be the kind of friendship that only 30 and more years of shared memories and parenting can give. But we shall not get there unless the truths are faced. My plea therefore, is that attention be given to spouses, partners and relations to properly understand that having a transsexual partner does not change you, and that recognition of the underlying nature of another human being does not change their intentions towards you. At present there is absolutely nothing available. If you are diagnosed with a debilitating disease, there is support available for carers. It is respectable to be related to someone who suffers. Not so if that someone is transsexual. It reflects on you, makes you feel you must be something you don’t like or respond to (OMG – don’t even suggest that I may be bisexual, let alone lesbian!!). It is not obviously OK to tell your friends and family that your beloved is trans. (See my early poem: Not like a bone.) But it is almost exclusively the response from friends, that leaving a trans partner is the only reasonable thing to do. How can you explain? No pressure there, then!

For me, reconciliation requires the wholehearted recognition that I have always been a woman, unknowingly having the wrong outward appearance. It is also a wholehearted recognition that human love is not what we idealise, but is (perhaps most commonly) contingent on outward forms and meeting expectations.

The Mandela motif

To the last, Nelson Mandela was kindly, warm, smiling, human, both ordinary and somehow supreme. He achieved world-betterment through both truth and reconciliation.

Dear partners, wives and husbands of transsexual people everywhere: your truths may be unpalatable and force changes in the way you see yourselves and the world, but they are truths. They alone stand between you and reconciliation. You don’t have to want that, of course. But they also stand between you and peace with yourself. Whether you stay in partnership or not, there is no point in not being reconciled with yourself, and no future in not resolving your truths, between you and yourself.

Sometimes the world is just not the way you have been used to seeing it. Sometimes it is not black and white.

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National coming out day

  • Posted on October 12, 2013 at 8:36 am

I realised a little too late that October 11 was National Coming Out Day. Not that I would have done anything different. I sort of assume in the main that I am obvious, and have no qualms explaining gender dysphoria to anyone. I feel somewhat immune to the issues by now. I know I am different, and I know that it makes a difference to other people. It is a stumbling block to forming relationships, like a cellar door that remains closed and scary for others. I could say ‘Hey, there’s a light on down there! It’s cosy and furnished, it’s alright!’, but for some a cellar door is preferable.

So the idea of coming out is a tricky one. Partly, coming out makes a difference to you too. It’s the point of no more hiding and being free to express yourself, and that changes you. There’s no going back in other than among a completely new group of people. There are people I never came out to, simply because they never knew me before, and simply accept me as I am. After the first coming out, you begin wondering why you have to keep on doing it. It’s an explanation of course, but why? Coming out is itself an acknowledgement that parts of society don’t want you, or don’t want to really include you.

Coming out is also a big day for each individual friend, colleague, family member. I don’t remember any particular coming out to my daughter, for my wife it was an extended thing over years, accelerating to a point of no return. For others it was more a realisation that things would never be quite the same, but that it was OK. On a number of occasions it was group thing. But for each, my coming out was a decision point for them. How were they going to deal with the new knowledge and awareness? How was living with, loving, or knowing a transsexual woman going to affect their lives, and did they want to have to deal with that wholeheartedly, at arms length, or not at all?

Coming Out is a statement that who you are matters more than being loved or accepted for not being who you are. It is a transaction in which both sides evaluate acceptance of reality and the ability to cope with it.

Isn’t that sad? That as a society we make evaluations on the acceptability of reality? That October 11 2013 has been a day of people rejecting others for being authentic, and a day of realisation that self-authenticity has a price. It has also been a day of great reliefs, where people have found unexpected acceptance and even greater openness in others.

Last night I had a lovely conversation after dance with someone who hasn’t been well. We both live in our dance, we both write poetry, we are both musical. We met, in a way you don’t meet people in other settings. We shared, we hugged and kissed. It’s what people do in these wonderful new spaces I am finding. Did she know about my gender past? I have no idea, because either way it clearly didn’t matter.

Fear

Behind so much of the issues of coming out or being out, is fear. Insecurity. How will gender difference in myself or another affect me? Will it change me, stretch or challenge me? Can I cope if it does? Why? The further I travel the more ridiculous it seems that gender matters that much.

This branch of coming out is not about sexuality, which is another bundle of preconceptions and fears. Sexuality is more simply whether you would ever want to have sex with the other, and 99.9 per cent of the time, that is irrelevant. No, there is something about gender that is not about what you do in private. There is an unspoken fear that you are upsetting some social apple-cart by being different, or that you are deliberately undermining the meaning of life, even! And that does make it difficult to understand how an intimate relationship might be found, developed and survived. Fear hangs on.

I was walking and talking with a friend this week. Had my experience been a Pandora’s box? If so, my fanged creatures were winged and had long departed, leaving some rather good things free to emerge unsuppressed. I suggested we all have Pandora’s boxes of varying sizes, and acknowledged that I had spent the whole of my marriage in fear of being discovered, found out, for I knew not what. It really is lovely knowing that all that fear has completely gone away. Life really does feel very different. Fear and love are strange companions. I lost both; no more fighting between the two.

In a dance workshop this week, we explored breathing. This involved feeling each other’s breath, increasing perception, releasing. It was physical, and I felt accepting hands, another’s awareness of my body, a closeness, that I have not felt for years. It was a very profound thing for me, though not strange in these places, and something I have increasing comfort with. It’s great therapy for fear as well.

I think the antidote to fear, and indeed to coming out, is trust. Not throw-yourself-off-a-cliff-someone-will-catch you kind of trust, but where you know another accepts you for being who you are, not what they would like you to be. There are always some people like that, and whatever their decision on your coming out day or days, you know it matters more to them that you are true to yourself than that you play to their tune.

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