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Real life experience

  • Posted on December 29, 2013 at 4:35 pm

I am just emerging into the third year of this blog, and yesterday, wanting to reflect on the past year, accidentally jumped back two years in looking for what I’d written. That was three months before full transition, and yet every bit as clear as now with regard to my gender, so at first I was confused. Then I went back to last year, as intended. Ah yes! I began dancing … and even that seems a lifetime ago.

Running through the grief and grouse that life has often been in the last few years, is a thread of great happiness to have resolved a lifelong threat to being an otherwise nice person. A while ago I left a short photo-trail on Facebook that sort of filled a gap between leaving my last job and starting this one. In three different hairstyles, through to my own hair growing out, I can be seen finding my new appearance, but always looking happy. I’d forgotten the pictures until a new Facebook friend was leafing through and ‘liked’ one. So the picture resurfaced, and attracted some lovely comments. There, I was happy; attractive enough, but different – not as relaxed and natural as I am now. But it was from only a couple of months after I left my last job, and at the time my family did not see me like this at all. I left a comment that I am glad I didn’t know what lay ahead of me at the time.

This time last year I was deeply happy to have discovered dance, after the trauma of my first Christmas unwelcome in my own family. I had a lot more to go through in the following months, but I did emerge with a full diagnosis as transsexual in the summer, and an autumn referral onward for full clinical treatment. Since when I have heard nothing. At this point, I have only three months to go until I have completed what is endearingly referred to as two years ‘real life experience’ for the benefit of Charing Cross Gender Clinic, and three full years since that early happy photo.

Smiles like that wear thin when you are left in limbo three years on. I have learned and gained a lot in this past year, not least to let go of what is not mine in this life to keep or expect. I feel well-grounded, relatively secure, grief is mostly in that ‘drawer of tears / for when the wind blows’ (poem). But following on from recent blogs, and as we enter 2014, allow me to ask you:

‘How is your real life experience going?’

Do you understand the question? Do you have a real life as opposed to an unreal one? Do you have an alternative life at all? Do you have any experience other than life? So how can anyone have a real life experience of anything other than themselves?

Of course I know it is a convenience for: ‘can you live permanently as you say you want to?’, which some people still refer to as ‘living in role’. But I have never regarded my life at any time as role-play either. Have you? So it is a curious construct that for people who identify as trans*, we create a bizarre idea that they can ‘try out’ gender as if it is an act, and see if the act feels real enough to perpetuate, and if they can perpetuate it, after two years it ceases to be a real life experience and becomes … what?

The photo of me, looking happy, on the rather lovely reclining leather sofa I was to leave behind, was, if anything, the end of an act, of living up to other people’s expectations. Life had been real enough, and certainly an experience, but in many ways it had been living in fear of being found out for being bad.

If 2011 was my biggest revelation, then 2012 was the most difficult of my life, and the most hurt. But 2013 has been a healing year in many ways. Friendships have been tested (and held, no thanks to me), and I have moved in new circles doing new things. I’ve read my poetry in several places, including Brighton Pride, survived pneumonia, and improvised dance without second thought in front of my peers. If anything, I have been more free to discover myself, express myself, and find people who understand. Not in a trans* world or community, but simply as myself in the world.

Maybe this is real life experience, and maybe it’s what we all should have, without a horizon, a milestone, a box to tick off. I like it, so why give it a beginning or an end? And what, if anything, has it to do with being trans*?

My other new year thought is for everyone out there who in the last 12 months has finally set out to be authentic after a life, however short or long, of being misgendered. It is a lovely thing to see people find themselves, against their personal odds, and stick with it.

And to everyone who reads this: enjoy your real life experience.

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Let’s talk over T (testosterone)

  • Posted on December 21, 2013 at 10:13 am

I don’t know which of us said it first. Three of us were discussing medical issues and lack of clinical care (well, interest, actually). Suddenly we were in complete agreement: blocking testosterone and the male sex drive was a huge relief. A single molecule has such an enormous impact – I’ve seen what it does to a male to female trans person, and envied it’s speed of transformation. But yes, losing that urge, the imperative to respond constantly to it, is heaven-sent.

Time and again over the past few years I’ve spoken with trans people at all stages and every variety. It’s a tough call when you have a contented relationship and good sex: if I lose my drive, will everything else crumble around me? Hell, I need sex, I love it! And what, you’re saying my libido will dive?? And yes, it’s a big thing, among all the other big things.

What is desirable?

I don’t believe that libido is the main factor in relationships and marriages destroyed by transition. Many marriages cope with that. The same applies to impotence; marriages survive. ‘Becoming the same gender as me’ is far bigger, and a partner unable or unwilling to explore the potential in a context of love may include libido in that deal. Which is interesting. Loving marriages survive impotence, lack of libido, disease, injury and surgery affecting genitals. Not always, but love does overcome. Nobody calls you (and you don’t call yourself) gay or lesbian or bisexual for finding new ways to be intimate and mutually satisfying for what has been lost, altered or rearranged. Being trans seems to be quite different.

So we also talked about orgasms. Yes, the female orgasm is different, yes we still achieve it, differently, and we understand it. And we still want it, though nothing like as much. Phew! In some ways I question whether I have lost libido, or just lost drive. Do I want sex? Hell, yes! But not because I am driven, but because I want that kind of loving sharing in my life, that kind of giving, that kind of being wanted.

Is it inappropriate to quote Shakespeare ‘Aye, there’s the rub!’ (appropriately from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’ soliloquy. Interesting, do read it!)?

Blockers and blockers

If this information is useful to you in your trans decision point, well and good. I sometimes meet people reaching the point I did three years ago, uncertain of what transgender and transsexual and gender dysphoria mean, and how prepared they are to discover their own position. These things are seriously important. I discovered the female orgasm long before I lost my sex life, and attracted hugely more attention in online comment than from anything else I wrote later about being trans! But now I have to worry that people who need to read these things will actually never reach my page. The idea of protection through Internet filters may seem good, but it is now blocking access to young people especially, from good information about their sexuality and their gender.

The message appears to be quite plain: learning about sex is bad, finding your gender puts you at risk. Web pages that talk about sex are bad for you and we can’t trust you. Why can’t we trust you? Because all those human beings with testosterone in their blood (like you, mainly) are out to corrupt you. Jane Fae has written about this (link at the bottom to one of her articles, do read it), pointing out that the cultural context of good and bad has also slipped out of our national hands. And this is in a month in which India and Uganda have been added to Russia and Ukraine in the news for savage repression of gay and lesbian people and issues. Precolonial societies had fewer problems with homosexuality and with transsexuality than after our western imports with their male god and male standards, based of course on testosterone, power and guilt.

Pornography

In the middle of this stands pornography. As old as drawing itself, sex is a human activity that has been portrayed as naturally as hunting and building houses. It becomes secretive and dirty when boundaries are stretched, when consent is absent, and when guilt is woven into it. ‘Have sex, but don’t look at anyone else having it’ is a curious construct that is about a lot more than privacy and monogamy. For very many young people, it is the only way to see what another person’s genitals actually look like, how they work and are used. Don’t most of us look at it and use it this way at some point? If we could do that objectively with grown-ups in the absence of embarrassment and guilt, maybe it would not be seen the same way. Can we not accept that male and female responses are a bit different? That it’s OK for you to find a naked male arousing, and for you to find a naked female arousing (whatever you are)?

Underlying much of our guilt and societal dysfunction over sex, pornography, sexuality and gender identity is something that we just don’t seem to want to let go of: testosterone is the power driver of western civilisation. And we allow it to be so. How many women remark that wars would not start if women were in power? That society would be calmer, fairer and kinder? I won’t digress into feminist politics here, but there is real truth in this. Women are subjugated, denied, reduced and treated as second to men, everywhere and every day. Testosterone makes men feel stronger, bigger, more important, driven, and also competitive and yet insular.

That, not the pictures within pornography per se, is the problem. The choice of portrayal, the manner of procurement, the route of delivery, the potential addiction, and the refusal to grasp the issues, are what result in the blocking, that may stop many people reading this page.

Back to blockers

The three of us like the effect of blockers, necessary until surgery relieves us of the underlying cause. No, I am not recommending this for all men, only recognition of this fact in our lives. And here is an interesting illustration, if you would care to compare the top right (progesterone) and bottom left (testosterone) molecules. That little adjustment highlights how close our differences are, and yet what a world of difference they make:

compare hormone molecules

Let’s have the right kind of blockers then, supplied to those who need them, and understand what is being blocked and why. I’m glad you are able to read this. Some people won’t be able to.

 

Jane Fae’s article: Three embarrassing truths about Cameron’s porn filter

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Remembrance

  • Posted on November 16, 2013 at 5:57 pm

I’ve told a few cis friends that I shall be going to a TDOR event this month. TDOR, on the 20th November each year is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Hot on the heels of Remembrance Sunday and the 11th November memorials, some assume that it must be something to do with trans people in the two world wars. Understandable, but it did set me thinking.

First of all, what is TDOR all about? Observed all around the world now, it commemorates all those transgender and transsexual people who have been killed through the year as a direct result of transphobic actions arising from fear and hatred. Roll-calls of the dead are read out, and those who suffer from transphobia are remembered. In many countries murders of trans people are not recorded as hate crimes, and any other reason than transphobia can be given as motive. We remember people in countries where transphobia is cultural and endemic, and those who take their own lives because others make living intolerable.

This should be on mainstream news bulletins, but being a minority issue, it rarely gets covered. Why should the world remark? There are fewer trans people than many other minorities, and to be frank, few people actually care about transphobia, maybe because they don’t understand that people are born trans, and that so many end up in unfortunate circumstances that lead to being very vulnerable, simply because society finds being trans confusing, curious and, well, weird. It’s time the world came to see that a small percentage of every population consists of people whose brains and natures for real physiological reasons are at odds with their reproductive organs. Yes, that’s all it boils down to. It happens. Rather a lot.

Parallels

Back to the confusion. The word ‘remembrance’ is not used much, in fact we mostly only hear it in reference to war. Younger generations now question so much remembrance at such distance over events they can’t imagine being repeated, and see the side that almost justifies war for producing heroism. The ‘war to end all wars’ did not, and many wars have followed. Fighting still seems a human necessity, and talking, sharing, negotiating, understanding, still are not good enough for us to live peaceably. We do not like change from what we believe were unalterable foundations.

In the West, the gender binary is such a foundation too, almost like a nation’s borders are sacrosanct and to be defended.

Transgender Remembrance? I recall the many times I have been called brave, courageous, almost heroic, for being visibly, honestly trans. I mean, what was that choice all about? Following the order by an officer to go ‘over the top’ was obedience. To be killed doing so was heroic. That’s millions of heroes over the years doing what they thought was right, learned primarily from others and the mores of the day. But being trans? There is no order from anyone else. In fact coming out as trans in many ways goes against everyone else’s expectations, hopes and wishes. And yet we are still being told we are pioneering, brave, even heroic, for daring to be different. Maybe there is greater courage in being true to yourself – even though it means risk, danger and rejection or worse – than in fighting someone else’s war, even for your country, if only because you do it alone, and out of who you are, not what you believe in.

No. We are different, we don’t just think differently. Just as you as a cis woman, or you as a cis man, are different from all the others who are not. It’s just that you have a validated name, and we do not. And for that, the world over, some of us are murdered. It’s a few hundred, but it is specific and targeted. That means in some countries and circumstances I too would be in real danger whereas you as a cis person would not. Yes, it is also true of being gay or lesbian, but at least most of the world will rise up against that kind of discrimination now, whereas for trans people they still stand back.

So in this remembrance for those of us who are killed, there is no particular bravery or courage other than the imperative to be true to ourselves.

Thankfully, where I live, I do not have to think where I am going when I go out alone at night. I am too old to frequent clubs and drunken younger people, and not all that obvious visually. But for millions of people like me in other places, watching your back, for the way you were born, is a daily way of living.

This remembrance is an important one, so if it’s new to you, hang onto it, and just think that if you count me a friend, even an Internet friend, I am merely one of the lucky ones who as yet has not been roughed up, attacked, beaten or worse for being trans. But I might. Tell others about TDOR; don’t be embarrassed. They might meet me or another trans person one day and realise how normal we can be, and how at risk.

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Angry. OK?!

  • Posted on August 2, 2013 at 11:01 pm

transgender flagHave I done anger yet? Maybe a bit, for example: We have had enough, but it feels like time to talk anger, to feel anger, see anger and to speak it. Not in fury or resentment, but from the heart.

This week, weekend to weekend, has been Pride in Brighton. Being the centre of the world, of course it’s a non-local event, and has become a carnival, a big party, a celebration. Look, world, we can be gay, we can be lesbian, and our sexuality has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how we were born. Stuff you, we’re proud! And by now Pride everywhere attracts our friends and relations in joyful support.

We’ve arrived! YeeHaaa!

Haven’t we? I could walk out of Pride Park and be abused on my way to the station. Not for being gay or lesbian, but for being trans*. But in fact the worst street abuse I have had, and in Brighton, in daylight, was for being a woman. Vile stuff that went on and on, from men in a small truck.

Pride has become carnival for the huge strides in acceptance of sexual diversity in this country. It began in anger, in protest for equal human rights, against hate and bigotry embodied in the law, expressed in the media, ingrained in culture and perpetuated by blind beliefs. In no small part, religious dogma and doctrines have been responsible for the roots of this culture.

I want anger again. I want real anger for media hounding and othering. I want anger for women being expected to protect themselves rather than men being expected to drop their societal privilege. I want anger because of events like 50 rape threats an hour online when Caroline Criado-Perez succeeded in her campaign for a woman to feature on a UK banknote. Sexual threat against any woman who has an opinion, success without acting masculine or adopting male dominating attitudes is a deep sickness that has been accepted in our society. It’s just men being men. Carry a rape alarm and avoid dark places. It’s up to you to be safe.

I want anger that Pride has had to exist at all. I want anger that countries where Pride is a feature still allow trans* people to be demeaned and diminished, working below their skill levels or unemployed, and subject to violence and hatred. I want anger, that at one end of the year the carnival streets are alive with Pride, while at the other there are quiet, dignified events marking the Transgender Day of Remembrance. That one is in the media with colour pictures, whilst the other hardly features for its sobriety.

I want anger that a large proportion of people attending pride still have no idea what trans* really means. That ‘T’ is an honorary add-on member smiled upon and thought of as being something sexual.

Trans Pride – a first

This year in Brighton saw the first Trans Pride event in Europe. It was a gathering in celebration of trans* people finding each other, being free and happy together, enjoying a degree of quiet acceptance, good entertainment, and rain. But among the 1,500 who went, probably every single one will have suffered some abuse, and every one will at least know another who has attempted suicide, if not having done so themselves. Many, if not most, will have experienced some rejection by one or more family members.

I wish I could have gone, but I had previous commitments. And to be fair, I do have some reservations about anything that requires me to ‘belong to a community’, when I just feel normal and ordinary. And yet standing out is an important statement too. Or at least standing up. Because there is much still to be said, and a lot to be angry about.

The need to speak righteous anger

Injustice should shout to everyone who believes in humanity. Instead we have become a society of individuals afraid of being noticed, and afraid of reaching out to protect others lest we too be attacked. Pride is easy, because it’s a carnival. It wasn’t when it began. And there is nothing carnival about being trans* on a daily basis. If we survive, we are strong. As I often say, we are not brave, but we need a hell of a lot of courage.

Tomorrow I shall stand up in the largely LGB tent at Pride to read. I’ve wrestled with what to write, read or say. A nice bit of stirring, fun performance poetry? Would something gentle and thoughtful be more settling instead? (cue polite applause) But in reality I want to challenge, I want to be angry for my two minutes, for all the injustice and unfairness that happens on a daily basis to trans* people everywhere, including Brighton. And for where it comes from.

Our society as it is didn’t come from nowhere. We are not male dominated by default, not by some divine proclamation, and not because humans evolved fighting bears for survival. Comparative physical strength rather than inner strength is not by default the determinant of rights. And yet our heritage is stamped with ‘male is default’ (unless stated otherwise with ten good reasons listed beneath). Men are listened to more, expected to be the leaders (sorry, darling, didn’t notice you). Women are still expected to be the respondents and givers of pleasure through food, home-making or sex, still expected to accept what to do, still expected to listen before they speak, to concur before they disagree. All old feminist stuff? All still so terribly true.

And so I want to be angry that Pride has ever needed to exist, and that the carnival hides what is still a bigoted, wilful, male-dominated, unequal and unjust world right outside Pride Park. So if you are L or G or B, or just content to support and welcome others who are, spare more than a thought for what trans* people still encounter every day, with fewer protections and less support. Share a bit of anger for the overt and covert discrimination, for the hatred, for the media sensationalising, for the parents denied access, for the loneliness of being ‘different’ whilst being exactly the same as you on the inside. Because it all stems from not challenging societal norms, in origin flavoured powerfully by masculine religious culture and past doctrinal teachings.

I don’t mean deliberately to run up against people with faith – I will respect you if you respect me. But we do need an honesty about where societal norms originate about right and wrong, good and evil, and about how those norms have been given authority and by whom. Is your god male? Does your god have a history mostly of working through men, where women are the exceptions? Does your god have a history of male law-makers and priests, disciples, bishops, cardinals, and popes? Does your religion reflect ancient cultures where men ruled and women were usefully subservient? All of these things have helped give us a binary, clear-cut world where even gender and sexuality can be right or wrong. Why do so many feel suspicion about trans* people? Why is there that thought, that ‘something isn’t right here’, or indeed is ‘wrong’? Why is something that can be clinically diagnosed regarded as a moral issue, or distasteful? I reserve a bit of my anger for this, because in no small part I lived 40 years in fear and self-anger because of this cultural belief.

And now? I’m proud alright. And I’m angry. OK?!

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Lying in bed

  • Posted on May 6, 2013 at 9:45 am

All those times I lay back yearning for your mount.
Aching to be taken instead of only drawn to you.

You would take my hand, and place it—which I loved.
I always did the right thing, the right way, always—for you.

But if I took your hand, placed it, was held—it was that I should
take in turn. Not learn, nor just initiate, but teach—and take.

 

All those times I lay back, just yearning to be taken—
your primal desire to have, to do, to satisfy yourself.

But you could never know. ‘How strange’, you said, ‘to have
dangly bits—I really can’t imagine what it must feel like’—whilst I

I would look at you and know. And I didn’t lie, when I replied
that I knew exactly how it feels to be a woman—and yearning.

 

One of us was lying, in bed. Loving—but lying and not
realising. Eyes closed. Lying. Longing. Longing to be taken.

 

2013 © Andie Davidson

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