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Mirror, mirror …

  • Posted on June 28, 2014 at 8:05 am

Last week I told how it felt to see a photo of me from only two years ago, and not recognise myself easily. And how I look forward in the next step, to seeing myself naked in a mirror, to seeing myself as I know I should be.

Mirrors and gender dysphoria are a nasty combination for some, though never a terror for me personally. But that doesn’t mean I even liked my face before; I didn’t. I used to think of myself as ugly, but accepted that was what blokes my age had to be like. I am not beautiful, though. Just acceptable as a woman of a certain age, with slightly craggy features. I have considered a future plan for a slight tuck under the ears though: it would make a difference. We shall see.

This is not about mirrors and narcissism, but about being at peace with oneself after a lifetime disliking and living in some hate of some parts of what you are. Not all, just important parts. So what do I see differently, and why is the way I see myself so different from how others do? You may (possibly rightly) groan inwardly as I revisit yet again the idea of identity and relationships of any kind. It is just the awful irony that the more I see myself change, the more I want to be seen as the same person but more fulfilled. I mean, don’t you like me better as a happy person, with no self-hates and fears? No?

When you look at a trans* person, and reflect

You too are a mirror to a trans* friend, partner, divorcée … When they look at you from the same heart, through the same eyes, but at peace – what do they see in your face? Fear? Disgust? Coldness? Distance? In fact those things they always felt, looking at themselves as they used to appear in a mirror. I would surmise that you have also thought that we shouldn’t have had these thoughts about ourselves. After all, you liked us as we were, inauthentic and pained as it was. You wanted us to stay that way.

For us, this is about sense of self. We covered up a lot, we got by, but we knew all along that we were not living our whole lives, in full recognition of who we should, and could, be. Much of the time, we were probably doing it for you. And I wonder how you reflect about that, when the trans* person has transitioned, and stands in front of you, so different, and yet so much the same inside. What was it that ever made you close? Their commitment to being what you wanted, as a kind of devotion or loyalty? Perhaps they gave you the identity you wanted, as the normal spouse or partner or friend.

It’s such an irony isn’t it? I swap my old mirror reflection for a fresh one, and in the process, your loving smile becomes a cold and fearful one. I became authentic, and now you protect your identity by shutting me out. (This is not just about spouses, by the way.)

So why do we think our identities are at risk from each other at all? It is because we are, essentially, quite superficial? I mean, let’s actually be honest. It sounds awful, and it’s the last thing we want to think about ourselves. Superficial sounds mean, shallow, unconsidered, uncaring, and certainly unloving. It feels derogatory, but what I mean by it is layered, reaching only down a short way, rather than to the true otherness of a person. I have concluded that we tend on the whole to think that love is very deep – but practice it is something rather less. We have a belief in love as something big and beyond ourselves, a greater than, and we actually do want to belong in that place. But in practice, our real love is tipped off the scales quite easily. The things we say, the sweet nothings, the chemistry of romance and being in love, the vows and promises, are very fragile in reality. And so are many years of harmony and mutual loyalty. We love saying these things, but …

Imagine promising when you are twenty-something: ‘I promise to support and love and cherish you even when you lose your looks, or become impotent, or disabled, because I truly love you and commit myself to you.’

Yes, we say ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘forsaking all others’ because it sounds very grand and deep. But saying it in the above terms instead, is a bit raw isn’t it? Why can we not be more honest from the start: ‘I promise to love you so long as you meet my expectations, whereupon the deal is off.’? Because it would spoil the fairytale day?

A plea for an honest mirror

That’s why so many partnerships involving one being transsexual, hit the rocks. You might have found your true, happy, fearless and blissfully happy self … but baby, you’re on your own, because that is not what I want in you. I would rather have honesty, looking back. Then maybe I would have been able to face my own identity long ago, knowing that any commitment to me was humanly fragile in any case.

Really, the trans* partnership is no different from the husband running off with ‘a younger model’. No, really: ‘I don’t want the old, unattractive one any more, I need the right stimulus to feel alive, to feel wanted, desired as I feel I deserve.’ I mean, doesn’t that make pragmatic sense?

But when I say an honest mirror, dear Queen, I mean one that says ‘Snow White is OK!’ – not because the Queen is ugly, but because Snow White’s heart is in the right place, and should not be hated and rejected for her appearance. My bedroom mirror tells me now, not that I am the fairest of them all, but that I am real and authentic as I never was. Now I want someone who, as a mirror to me, reflects what they see in me as a person, not as a ‘man gone wrong’ and therefore no longer to be desired, but who I am inside: authentic and true to self. A mirror without fear that my reflection in their eyes changes everything.

You see, the question to the mirror was wrong. I never wanted to be the fairest, and I never wanted to compare myself. I wanted to know from my mirror how on earth I could be more fair. I wanted my mirror to show me how I could be more authentic, and in its dumb response, I could not find a way.

Learning from the trans* mirror?

What I would like others to see in me, as their mirror, is that nothing is fixed. That a person can change their appearance and be even more loving and generous, even if their body-sex is unexpected. I want someone to look in me and know that their identity is unchanged by mine, that they are safe, and I am safe, and that real love lies under the skin, and outlasts the changes all our bodies experience.

Do you fear becoming unloved simply for getting older?

Are you afraid that your friend, family member, partner, will walk out of your life and find you quite untouchable, just because you are ill, or disabled?

If anything, my trans* experience these last few years has taught me to re-evaluate what we mean by ‘love’ completely. Disillusioned? Yes, I am, but I have a much clearer idea of what real love requires. I still love someone who no longer loves me, but I mustn’t let it stop me finding someone who can.

And I shall not.

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Partly Sage, Rosemary, and Time

  • Posted on May 25, 2014 at 10:27 am

Yesterday I had tremendous fun performing my poetry at a Brighton venue called Minge Fringe.

The night before I had amazing dances with women at my usual Five Rhythms class.

On Monday I went out to eat, talk, and share a wonderful concert with my former wife.

And a close friend has noticed that our friendship has really changed for the better.

I have moved on.

I think I know myself so much better than I did before all this gender stuff really kicked off the need to do something. I am also aware of the sheer drain and strain it has placed on me and everyone around me. I am watching people I know, go through what will very soon be my final stage of dependency, but now it is right there, in my grasp, it feels different. I have forced myself to confront the potential misdirection, being swept up in the ‘right thing to do’ by the company I have kept, and I am quite clear that it is the proper outcome for me, which will only anchor my past in the past. It’s raised the issue of who I am, whether I have, or what has, changed – or whether I have simply been released to fulfil my identity, my sense of self, at last.

Why do I now stop strangers to ask directions? Why do I dance so freely? Why do I have total confidence whilst surrounded by sculptures and paintings of vulvas? Why do I not even stop to excuse myself any more, explaining that ‘if you haven’t guessed, I’m transsexual’? Why do I hold hands tenderly and mingle sweat with people I hardly know? Why do I feel so part of life?

And how can I now meet my former wife (I’m really trying hard to stop saying ex) with understanding, familiarity, real fondness and with past grief? People always say, as if it’s a truism, that time is a great healer. I know what they mean, but I don’t actually think it’s true. Time, of itself is inactive. Over time we forget, we let go, we simply give up, weary of repetitions. But time also does not always wipe away people’s bitterness, or insecurity, fear or trauma. Feuds persist across generations, bigotry can increase, religious fervour can burn stronger and breed hatred and supremacy.

Time is a herbal healer

I am not a great one for time as a healer. Time has nothing much to do with it. All time is, is a space or span within which to learn and grow. Time does not heal grief, it can only assist and give strength to natural processes, boosting what is naturally there to be more effective, like a herbal remedy. It gives space to learn to live with grief – the ‘unlosable gift’ that ‘finds its place to wear’, when the wind blows. And time will not heal my wounds after surgery; the biggest help will be the wisdom in knowing what not to do, as much of taking the active care. I know that part of that process will be understanding my body afresh, learning that it really is different. Without that I could be healed without being whole. Maybe I need to go back to Minge Fringe and mould some clay vulvas.

(Strange as it sounds, I do love this ownership of the vagina, that it is there for yourself, not as a receptacle for others, that it is private because precious, not from shame, and therefore shareable entirely on your own terms.)

Time is an opportunity, rather, to learn a bit of wisdom: hence this title, partly sage, Rosemary and time (because in my case, there really was a Rosemary who was instrumental in my becoming an honest poet, and in finding myself as a woman).

Natural remedies

Little these days touches me as personally and as deeply as my dance, and the encounters it brings. I apologised at the end of Friday’s dance, for my sweat-dripping face, horribly aware that I am the wettest dancer in the whole group. I was reassured that no, we were both sweaty and that sharing it is OK. And there we were, head against head, damp hair on damp hair, holding hands close to our bodies, hearing each other’s breath, having shared movement, a kind of empathy and understanding that could not have been spoken if we’d tried, scripted only by the emotions we were feeling. This, if anything is the meaning of being alive.

The space I walked into the following afternoon was equally unscripted, with the most amazing artistic talent expressed for free. And just like the dance, it was a safe space, where people depend on trust, on humanity, including unanimously asking a rather inebriated person to leave because he couldn’t shut up. I was completely liberated to perform with sensuality, to draw people in, to open people up, to share what it means to love and be lonely, and alive.

And the previous Monday? Kletz Mahler at the Brighton Festival was an utter feast of musicianship at its best, fast and furious Yiddish East European wedding music. Things done with clarinets that didn’t ought to be done with clarinets … Music without the stays, vibrant, alive. And of course, the strange experience of meeting someone I shared so many years with in complete intimacy, with a sense of all those things we perhaps never knew about each other. How might we use the remedies of time, learn a new wisdom, find in each other new and maybe unexpected things that could give us a new sense of what it is to be alive?

That, of course will take, partly, sage and time. With thanks to Rosemary for showing me along the way to where I am now.

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People! Who’d be one??

  • Posted on May 10, 2014 at 6:05 pm

Every now and then I realise deep, deep down, that to be human is the loneliest thing in the universe. As people, we make life as individuals horribly isolated and complicated. There is no alternative to the singularity of human life, and the only way not to be alone is to acknowledge this state of affairs and do something about it. And I believe the only way, is to expose the vulnerability of it, and not pretend otherwise.

I am a committing, bonding person, always have been, and probably always will be. That makes me something like a free radical. (Look them up on Google to find out more.) Basically they are molecules with a bit missing, that makes them highly reactive. Find them another molecule with a spare electron (or need of one) and they want to bond to make something new and extra.

It got me into trouble again. My natural tendency to bond made me too radical. My ‘missing’ particle, under discussion over a cup of tea, was subsequently interpreted as ‘too needy’ – and I lost a dear friend. Yes, another. But it’s alright, because very soon it won’t be able to happen, because I shall have run out of close friends. Look on the bright side.

I’m not being cynical or unduly sad, and certainly not bitter. What I want to repeat, is that going through gender transition – coming to terms with, and actually dealing with gender dysphoria – is a particularly difficult thing to do. One one hand, it is a tremendous self-actualisation, and unimagined move into happiness with self, that at times even feels absurd for being allowed to feel this good. On the other hand, there is everyone else. Those who shout in the street, those who humour you, those who distance themselves, and those who flatly reject you. So when one or two embrace your change, they don’t know what they are letting themselves in for. Self-obsession, a need for reassurance (or simply to be hugged without reservation), constant focus on the ‘big issue’, or no conversation that hasn’t got something in it relating to the problems of starting a gender life all over. It’s all there. Please don’t blame the transitioning person; they will get over it in a year or two! But please go gently, because it is so desperately hard at times to hold your new life together in the absence of love and affection and close support, and especially when you have lost it for becoming the best you can be. We take time to get there. My daily motto is still ‘I’m getting there …’ Maybe I should have it engraved on my headstone!

But this week also I got to the point where all the arguments, diatribes, philosophy and rationalisation are over, I feel it’s all been said. Over 200 blog posts since I started, and I have little to add. I shall write through the final phase, of course, since that too may help others, but when it comes to other people, this is it. A bit of genital reconstruction, a lot of pain, hassle and stuff to get through, and I shall be asking nothing more of anyone to help me ‘arrive’. The rest is self-discovery and development, with no ‘big things’. Take me or leave me, there are no permissions to seek; I am what I am. Period.

So anyway, what does this mean about us as people – all of us? What makes us feel safe? In a crowd, pressed together, we don’t fall over. Out on our own, and a little shove shows how vulnerable we all are. Some of us cope, by becoming small or lying down, where falling hurts less. Some hold onto one big thing that gives valency in the world – their lamp-post, shedding just enough light to give them a safe place. Maybe we are all looking for a simple, safe place, even if we venture out into daring other places and back again. I think I have faced some of this loneliness and outer darkness as never before, and have learned a little more. It is not so much threatening as empty. The scary bit is that if you were to need it, there might be no-one there, so I err on the side of daring to be hurt rather than playing safe. I think I’d rather stay a free and needy radical and work it out as I go along. Maybe there is a lot more hurt ahead, but maybe nothing worse than I’ve already felt. And maybe, just maybe, there is some other person willing to take the risk with me.

Being a people is so complicated – isn’t it?

I had a sleepless night chewing over how I had managed to lose my best friend. There’s no blame, a few reasons, and enough to reflect on and learn from. It made me realise (a good thing) a bit more of the impact of my words on my ex-wife through these transitioning years, and helped me see in a more generous light the hurt I too had caused.

And all I wanted was to start making peace with my oldest companion, friend, life-help and partner. It can’t be put back together, whatever friendship we find will be different, each free to go our own way – but we have over 30 years of memories that are shared, and always shall. Flowers, some tearful but sincere apologies from me, and I’m looking to make peace. Just that. A first hug in several years, and a hope that all this horrible mess of being people can be made a little more sense of, and with a little more kindness than I have shown. I think we are agreed on that.

We aren’t always good at being people, at being kind, or recognising the inherent loneliness we all have, simply being human. It’s a messy, untidy thing, and we hurt each other over and over, perhaps because we are lonely, and needy.

People! Hah! Who would be one?

Being a people is so complicated. My complication? Well the real one is that I still love the one I’m trying to make peace with, and that might scare her off too.

And you? Go on, do something radical. It’s OK to reach out and share needs. Love someone today, just because …

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Who does she think I am?

  • Posted on April 26, 2014 at 8:36 pm

Nearly two years ago, just before I decided I had to leave my home and walk away from my marriage, I tried to write from my wife’s perspective. I wrote Who does she think she is? It was an honest attempt to see what it was like for a husband to be replaced by an intruder, a woman, uninvited. At the time we were in therapy, and she objected to this post, despite its caveat, and asked that I remove it. One of our therapists said no, it was my valid experience and expression. I still feel that I captured something, even if it wasn’t my wife’s voice as she would have written it herself.

This question: ‘Who does she think I am?’ is again my imagined question, as if from my ex, in response to my protestations over the past few years. Again, I cannot claim to speak for her, I’m only trying to see the other side.

This week was bruising. I am a writer, and I can’t resist the urge to write. In my work I am meticulous in removing ambiguity, in my poetry I ‘show not tell’, deliberately introducing ambiguity. In my emails, at least with my ex, I am a terrible writer. I write when I should not, and I write in a way that is easily misunderstood, and probably show misunderstanding. I can hardly write dispassionately and objectively though, so I constantly make mistakes. Every time I attempt dialogue, she feels I’m invalidating her feelings, every time I try to stretch her imagination, I remind myself that it’s all over and that it is not my place to know her life as I used to. It is factually immaterial that I lost all family life, along with all we’d built together. It is not for me to claim that I lost more than she did, and there is no point speaking about the responsibility each of us shares. Everything has gone and we both lost. No-one won in this one.

And then an exchange on Facebook about trans suicide rates came up. Add to the ‘at least attempted’ all those who considered it, and the score is horrifically high. Fundamentally it is because being transsexual robs you of your place in society, among friends, in your family, and wrecks a large slice of your personal life. Faced with the choice of being wanted or loved for what you are not, and being authentic whilst losing it all, sometimes the only way out is down.

Then an entry in the thread, by a wife, pulled me up short. Suicide can be for spouses and partners too.

It really is that big. Why should you have to change your world view? It’s an earthquake in your life; it is traumatic, unexpected and unwanted. ‘What have I done, for my very macho, strong, secure, masculine husband to be removing all his body hair and transforming into something that looks a bit like a woman, whilst claiming that’s what they are?’ How can you live with that? This person who used to love you as a man is willfully undermining everything you hold dear, every reason you loved them, becoming a stranger and negotiating very little. How can that be OK? You do not have to go along with it, and maybe your survival means detaching from it. No, I was not the macho husband-man, nor was my ex suicidal. But I still perceive the reaction:

It’s obvious, isn’t it?! Who does she think I am?

From the inside, from the other side

Never ask a transsexual person to understand what it is like to be ‘cis’. We honestly don’t know. We can only imagine from the other side of transition, when memories fade. And don’t ask us to remember like you do. We can’t. Every single one of us can only remember our past experience in terms of what it meant or felt like to be ‘me’, from the inside. I wrote to my ex: ‘In a land without mirrors, my face has become ugly, and everyone can see it except me.’ What I meant was not that I am completely unattractive, but that (a) from the inside I cannot really understand why no-one wants to get physically close to me any more, and that (b) all my memories are from the inside of me, whilst everyone else’s memories of me are of the outside.

But I do still try to understand the impact of my transition, and I don’t take it lightly. Grief, rather than belligerence, mars my understanding. I do know that my wife had a man as a husband, and that this was the deal. Had I known at the time that I was born with gender dysphoria, I hope I would have been honest and dealt with it then. I would not have enjoyed 30 years living with my wife; we would never have married, because she was not looking for a woman. She would not have looked twice at me, and today, perhaps we would simply be writing occasional letters as friends from university days.

I am responsible for dissolving the husband/man façade in front of her eyes, pleading, yes, to be seen as a person not as a strictly gendered accessory. From my perspective, I can’t see why sex is so confined, and why people aren’t more attractive than their bodies. I can’t see why intimacy has to be hetero-binary. I can’t, because this is not the land I live in. But I do know that in her land, the ‘normal’ land, this is exactly how it is. Adam and Eve, Tarzan and Jane, and that is the way that most of us are made. It isn’t about the intellectual explanation, or the analysis I’ve been at pains to work through on this blog. It isn’t open to persuasion. My land is not her land, and she’s gone home. We went to the border, and she waved me off. If I was writing an apologetic for my country, then as a writer I failed, I was unpersuasive. That pen must now finally be put down.

If I have anything to say to you dear reader, if you have a transsexual spouse, or know someone who has, we may be unable to escape our gender dysphoria, but it does not mean we don’t try to understand how it is for you. It is just that authenticity comes first, and we have been forced finally to face inescapable realities that we have no choice than to embrace. You have that choice, and we cannot presume to make it for you. I hope your love is of a kind that prevails, but sadly it is rare, and you would not be unusual.

I argued a long time back to my then wife, that in the land of the blind, my hands would still feel the same, and love would not be turned away. I just see things differently, and as much as I cannot describe the colour blue to you, other than by attaching it to things, so I must accept that I could never describe my world to her. Her land is her land, and I no longer have a passport, but she has a life to lead, and maybe I’d just better not try to meet through the wire.

Which reminds me of a poem some while ago: Losing my touch (I counted on you).

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Show, not tell

  • Posted on April 18, 2014 at 8:56 am

It’s Easter. Two years ago I dug around the story, and was reminded today by a Facebook image doing the rounds saying that Easter comes from the goddess Ishtar. I knew this to be wrong, because I’d dug around Eostre instead. The poem is here, if you already need a digression!

At the time I felt the poem may be a little obscure, because most people were still just starting to realise that my transition was something real, and my objective in writing poetry was to lead not push. I could write prose, which is why I started this blog, but some people don’t like to be told, because they come head to head with their idea against mine, and that’s uncomfortable. Poetry that just ‘says it’ can be boring. A picture of a witch is just a picture, take it or leave it. But that familiar optical illusion that can switch mentally from being a drawing of an old woman in furs, to a witch’s head, is fascinating.

Sometimes we just can’t take being told

This week I took my poem Unspoken to a workshop, and resisted the temptation to say what it was about. I had dared to read it on local radio last year, but revisiting it, I still felt I needed reassurance and feedback. It still means something real and deep to me, it is still relevant, but it is all ‘show not tell’, and it is precisely about those things you can’t say because they could undo everything in an instant.

This reminded me very much of the whole business of coming out, of learning and speaking my truth. It felt subversive (something I like about poetry, but which felt uncomfortable to live out). I am not alone in the way I behaved, and I suspect this is a feature of many trans* people’s lives when they are working out how to tell the world that things need to change.

So this blog is for people coming out, for their friends and families. You can’t just be told, you need to realise a few things first to prepare you for understanding. For anyone to transition may be to find peace and authenticity, but it is one of the hardest things to do, because you know it won’t be understood.

And this is why we start wearing bits of the ‘wrong’ clothing, jewellery or make-up, begin to soften in our ways, and why things appear in our wardrobes that ‘shouldn’t be there’. For people transitioning female to male, that may be a lot less obvious, rather ‘why don’t you like doing that any more?’ It may not be the best way to do this! But what many of us are trying to do is introduce new ideas about ourselves, new ways of seeing us, new understandings of being the same person looking different, feeling better. You might just se this as weird or even disturbing. It may not be what you want. But what we are trying to show is that we have to change, we want you to notice, and we need you to ask, so we can be open without thrusting it on you. This conversation can lead to shared understanding and travelling forward together, or it may lead to separation and loss. We don’t intend to hurt anyone by coming out. After all, we are only being true to ourselves.

To you it probably seems like deception. We are writing poetry in our lives, and you want the classic story with a happy ending.

Deception was an unfortunate keynote in the divorce petition against me. It was felt necessary, it wasn’t a grudge. But it was there; it was the remembered thing. Shoes were in the wardrobe, and that meant I was going out. Without permission. How embarrassing. My gender dysphoria was an unacceptable behaviour. (Popular link to my page on behaviour, here.) But I remember wanting desperately to be discovered from hints so that a legitimate enquiry could be made, for me to explain. There were things left sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately, stuck in a drawer, trapped in wardrobe doors. Nail varnish left on, beads worn with my old clothes, new mannerisms, books and leaflets on trans* issues; all sorts.

My ‘Unspoken’ poem obviously spoke, because my fellow poets in Brighton picked up on the emotions, the situation and the meaning of the poem quite easily. I still feel embarrassed about my hints before coming out. So I wrote another poem:

Show not tell

Was I really learning the art,
poet in the making, risk averse?

A skirt caught in closet doors,
an obvious symbol without reason.

Without rhyme, hoping to scan as
pent… something, I am… bic

in hand, but blocked, right as
blocked, wrong to be spoken.

So the coloured skirt, in draft
as a chill wind stirring flowers

invisible but spoken, my self
trying to show, not tell.

Once again, this is a poem where the sounds of the words and how they join, really matter. Find the words that carry two meanings. It’s just another way of saying that when we communicate in a way that invites enquiry, it can be because we have something to say that we can’t just speak out on. We need your wanting to understand.

So if your spouse, or sibling, or child, or parent or friend is acting strangely, and you know something isn’t right any more, ask what they are trying to show you so that you can see, not so that an explanation and justification can be given and things go ‘back to normal’.

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