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Suddenly, the suspended sentence …

  • Posted on April 5, 2014 at 9:19 am

I returned to dancing last night, my first opportunity in a month after playing in an orchestra for a concert, which occupied the same evening of the week. It was really lovely to see friends again, have a hug or two and dance, and dance, and sweat, and express and release. I had it marked in my diary as ‘2 years!’

On April 4 2012, someone, somewhere, date stamped my deed poll, and I became legally Ms Andie.

I’ve gone through other two-year markers, but this is the one that is taken as the starting blocks for transition and eligibility for true recognition in your own gender identity. Until this point, the assertion is that you are still in your birth-assigned gender, and that anything else is unproven. For two years I have been Ms Andie by name only, with the proviso that if I could make it through, I would have the right to apply to legally change my gender marker, including my birth certificate. It is true that, had I faltered, I would be referred to as a man, trying to be something I wasn’t. It has been just like a suspended sentence, and that period is now over for good.

A quick review then of living under a suspended sentence

I remember the day I simply gave up waiting for approval, and filled in my deed poll application. Downloaded forms, filled in and signed, no second thoughts about a very simple name, taken to a good friend to be witnessed, a small cheque and into the post. And the day it came back, date stamped stating that I was no longer entitled to be addressed for any official purpose by any other name.

I remember clearing my wardrobe and drawers. Some to the textile recycling, most to a charity shop. And the feeling of returning home to the absence of all the old trappings, my own clothes no longer crushed into the wardrobe.

This was the time when all intimacy in my life ended, and I have known none since. Family life (my daughter aside) continued for another six months, but I was no longer welcome in my own home. I made it through my son’s graduation in Falmouth, which was a big enough and public enough event, with all the other parents around, but no-one gave me a look or batted an eyelid.

This was the start of my assessment too. One month after the deed poll (yes, after!) I saw the first of four psychiatrists, in order to be assessed as to whether I was mentally or emotionally disturbed or whether, indeed, I was born transsexual. The suspended sentence began.

Soon after the deed poll I also knew I needed to find employment; being self-employed wasn’t guaranteed to provide an income for life on my own. Partly by chance I gained the opportunity to do some consultancy, and that turned into full-time employment within three months. It was the first time in 30 years that I was not a manager, and it has been both safe but frustrating. I found complete acceptance at work, and to be honest, looking at my photos from the time, I can see that courage and confidence was everything!

With the start of work, the same week, I started self-prescribed hormones and testosterone blockers. Carefully, and researched, but yes, against the rules, because I knew that clinical attention was going to take a long time. It did; in fact it took a year before I was able to gain prescriptions. Several very widely-spaced trips to London and the gender identity clinic, dragged me across the two years entirely beholden to the judgement of others. It was like being called in to check the terms and compliance of my probation. There were no hiccups in terms of my feelings about myself, and no doubts ever expressed over my declared identity, just a lot of time, misleading expectations, and ultimate failure to deliver timely clinical interventions.

Back to June 2012 though, and I hit rock bottom just two months after the deed poll. I felt destined never to be truly regarded as a woman. Or indeed as a man. Rather, it hit me hard that I had to face the rest of my life being nothing. Excluded from normal human expectations, I felt it was better not to live at all. I knew that I may never be truly loved and cherished ever again. I might have been right; I’ve just learned for now to live with it. In therapy at this time, I made a promise to myself not to kill myself, and I have a token of that promise in the form of a piece of quartz crystal I was given, that stays at my bedside.

And just two months after this I knew, for my own safety from myself, I had to move out on my own. This was the worst time of all, and I’ve written enough about it. But I found a lovely place to go, very quickly and easily, and by October I was living on my own, stranger to my family, confirmed in permanent employment, and learning to rebuild a domestic life in my own style. I would not have done this at all well without the help of just a few, and one particular, close friend.

It took until the end of the year to actually have my first appointment at the gender identity clinic, but being a woman in the world, feeling the effects of hormones, and finding my feet with no shadow of the past dragging me back, was wonderful. I had a public poetry reading at the South Bank, a very lonely Christmas, discovered dance, finally shed the prosthetic aids (boobs and hair) took myself back to counselling to straighten out my grief and loss, went through a very instructive episode of pneumonia all before appointment number two in London. By this time (May 2013) I was feeling so completely naturalised in living my gender that having to submit to these consultations was annoying. The third (not until September 2013, was deeply irritating). But the May diagnosis did at least get me the prescriptions.

Summer brought me into regular Five Rhythms dance, from which I have never recovered. It is my deepest expression of self amongst some of the nicest and most genuine people I have met, and a season of small-group workshops in the autumn was an added privilege.

Autumn 2013 saw me cleared for gender confirmation surgery, and the story of how I am now fast tracked for July treatment is in recent blogs. I finally sold the marital home, bought a flat nearer to friends, and settled. Three months ago I was divorced. From now on, it’s just me.

So much more has happened, but all these things have been with a sense of very normal living, a deep gratitude for being finally ‘allowed’ to be myself, finding great happiness in that, and knowing day by day that I’m ‘getting there’. Not easy, and I have been a real pain to even my best friends at times, but I am where I should be, not just where I want to be.

Judgement over

What this blog is about, is simply that all these major changes have happened under the banner of the suspended sentence, termed variously as ‘real life experience’, ‘living as a woman’ and so on, as if it were all temporary, subject to change and approval before I could ‘really’ claim to be be myself, a woman, and not just transgendered or transsexual. It is as much an affirmation that I have not changed, I have just found myself.

April 4, 2014; finally the suspended sentence …

… is over.

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So far away

  • Posted on March 8, 2014 at 8:38 am

This week I was revisited by a feeling of being alone. After several vibrant long days at work, with some small sense of achievement, coming home to a silent flat for a whole evening alone hasn’t felt like fun. Nor was it sufficient stimulus for the opportunity of doing the dusting! I did some writing, which was good. In fact two poems, one, Voice, I put up here pending revision and better crafting, the other left me in a quandry.

Lyricists have long been in danger of writing love songs to people they’ve subsequently cheated on, poets are often asked if it’s autobiographical, and novelists where such ideas could have come from other than within. So it is with this other poem I wrote. I actually like it, because it’s neat with use of words and ambiguity, a touch flirtatious, but heartfelt too. And though it doesn’t speak of love, it is a love poem. And it speaks about when love is unspeakable. Perhaps there is nothing as bittersweet as unrequited love, especially when it isn’t just intoxication or infatuation.

As I approach the two-year point since the final vestiges of living-as-male were shed, everything seems so far away. By now it is unreachable. I have memories, and I dare to touch them again, though I’m still not sure whether they are people frozen as statues as in Narnia, or moving images like photographs in Harry Potter. Both are an evil magic in some ways. But more to the point, nothing has filled the space. And I don’t really know what the space is any more. What does ‘a committed relationship’ mean now? I don’t want the claustrophobia of me or a partner not being able to do their own thing because everything has to be done together, but I do want to know that there is someone who always puts my interests ahead of others, simply because they always care, and because I know they have a love that won’t change from day to day. I want affection; I want to be wanted; I want to be cuddled. More: I want to give the same without it being blocked because of what I am.

How do you say this?

I dipped a toe in the online dating pond, not as far as paying, only as profiling. In response to ‘woman seeking woman, Brighton, within 60 miles’ and lots of good things about me, I have had a stream of people who might be interested (overlapping profiles) – from Scotland, Lancashire, Northern Ireland and it may as well be Timbuctoo! OK, unless I pay, there won’t be real matches, but they’re not exactly encouraging me to sign up and pay. And anyway, I actually don’t want this kind of relationship-finding displacing a best friendship I already have. Nor do I want to lose a friendship by saying anything I shouldn’t say.

As yet I have not experienced anyone showing the slightest ‘interest’ in me. Just as my wife would tell me ‘I just don’t know how to relate to you (as a woman)’, I don’t think people do know. I’m safe as a friend, but I’m not in the category of possibles, because, well, what am I? That was my last relationships blog, so I won’t go there again, but it does fit this feeling of ‘so far away’. Anyone I think may be a possible ever-closer friend/partner knows exactly where to stop and defend territory (or any inclination to make me an exception). As soon as I am not one thing or I am another, I know we are destined to be ‘just friends’. And that is how I fear it will always be, however I feel.

This isn’t a grouse, but I keep thinking about this Midas Touch – not that I turn anything into gold and add value, but that what I am is a danger to anyone who gets too close: I would change them. Know me, and you instantly become one of those people who knows a transsexual person. Touch me and you instantly become someone who touches … Kiss me and you instantly become someone of ‘other’ sexuality. Love me? I can be your friend while you go dating.

I don’t know how to bridge the gap, so if you have any really good ideas, please let me know. Anyone I talk to about this is terribly kind in their words. Of course I’ll find someone, I mean, haven’t I a lot going for me? Musician? Artist? Writer? Dancer? Thinker? Philosopher? Terrible jokes, but somehow still fun? Highly intelligent and witty? Committing, loyal, kind and deeply loving?

Sadly, none of these things count if, when you imagine being intimate, what I am makes you feel less than what you want to feel you are. You’re ‘not wired’ for people like me? Being wired differently myself, I can never understand that either.

Ideas on a postcard please.

And just because I really like it for touching a really tender spot, here is ‘So far away’ by Carole King.

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Can you imagine a trans partner?

  • Posted on March 1, 2014 at 8:46 am
  • If you’re gender queer and move in circles where others like you find relationships natural, go celebrate!
  • If you’re a bit older, trans* and don’t have others to find intimate relationships with, you go celibate.

I feel a need to discuss why this is, without a long diatribe, and without tying myself in knots (which is easy). Is it simple after all? If you are cis-gay or cis-lesbian (OK, so you just hate labels!, I simply mean not trans*) – then you can seek out places where lesbian and gay people find each other for relationships. But that’s where the T in LGBT parts company. As a result of being trans*, maybe you are lesbian or gay in your found gender. But unlike cis-lesbian and cis-gay people, you don’t need other trans* people to express your sexuality. Trans* is not a sexuality, but rather can give rise to fluidity and change.

And that, as far as I see it, is where the problems start. Not that you aren’t lesbian or gay or bi or even hetero, but that society in general doesn’t actually really believe your gender. Therefore your sexuality, not being based on cis-binary definition, is also in doubt. You may have everything going for you as a genuine, nice, kind, loving person, but What are you, really?

Your decision on what I am really, has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you.

What do I mean by this? If you can accept me as a woman, and only as that, then it is easier to accept that I am hetero, lesbian or bi. Not a bed of roses, maybe, but at least we know where we stand. A lesbian woman will feel safe, as would a hetero man. A hetero woman or a gay man will say no, on the basis that they can’t imagine contravening their sexuality. Or perhaps it is just that attraction could never happen.

If you knew or remember me presenting as a man, it seems we are all at sea. Somewhere in your mind I am not really a woman, though certainly not really a man either, just something indeterminate with infectious potential to make you lose your bearings. That means I cannot be lesbian, I cannot be gay, I cannot be hetero, and therefore you cannot imagine what a relationship might mean. To preserve your doubt about what I am really, I have to be none of the above. It’s almost like Schrödinger’s cat; I am OK so long as you don’t try to really find out! Losing your doubt about my gender can hit your sense of sexual identity hard, if it isn’ what you originally thought. And then you might think of me as the only woman you could physically love, but a friend might as a consequence think you are lesbian, or suddenly not (perhaps even betraying the cause), just because you have gotten close to me and they doubt my gender!

So what do you do with a trans person, who might possibly seem attractive enough to get close to, or intimate with?

First off, you must accept that another’s gender is not your decision, or up to your definition.

Second, you must decide whether your capacity for love of another human being is defined by your idea of what sexuality is.

Third, decide whether a person’s social gender history actually changes you, or whether it only changes your preconceptions.

Fourth, decide whether you know yourself well enough to stand up to what other people think and say.

Only then are you on firm enough ground to entrust yourself and gain a trans partner’s trust, because the voice in you and the voices of others will otherwise go on asking: what are they, really; what are you, really? Most of us never have to be bothered enough to even think of these questions, so being faced with a trans* potential partner is a demand you may prefer to sidestep.

What you think I am affects your definition of yourself.

If you think I make you a lesbian, or gay, and that matters to you, please understand that it is the result of your beliefs about cis-binary sexuality, not because I might harm or damage your reputation or self-esteem. I probably only want to love you …

Summary

It is confusing. What I am getting at is that loving relationships for trans* people are hard to find because people have a fear that some kind of indeterminacy about our gender affects their sense of their own sexuality. It is an extra demand. Only people who can get over that, and find a security about themselves, will realise that loving us is no different from loving anyone they might get to like.

Meantime I feel in utter limbo, because in my generation, finding a new love seems impossible; the doubt: ‘what do I think you really are’ is always present. Just another aspect of what it feels like to be transsexual. I hope it helps.

Continue reading Can you imagine a trans partner? »

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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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