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Leaving peripherals behind; letting go (2)

  • Posted on January 26, 2013 at 3:32 pm

Winnie the Pooh: E.H. ShepherdThis is my 100th blog post. Not that it’s an achievement, only ‘OMG no-one’s going to read that any more’! But it has been therapeutic for me, helpful for some, and spoken for others, so I don’t think it’s a waste of time.

Anyhow, today’s reading is taken from the book of Pooh:

‘Hello, Rabbit,’ he [Pooh] said, ‘is that you?’

‘Let’s pretend it isn’t,’ said Rabbit, ‘and see what happens.’

How do you know when someone is pretending to be themselves?

 

In the privacy of your soul, there is something that no-one else can ever know. And it is you.

You think you can understand it, and if you can explain it, in words, an image, in music, by analogy, then another will know who you are, and understand.

They think they can understand it, because they are thinking, intelligent, empathic, and – like you – people with life experiences as parallels and comparisons.

And the most loving among us try so hard. But when it comes down to it, we fail. I don’t think I’m any better than anyone else at this. I just hope I am now learning that I can’t know another anything like they know themselves, and to respect that. And if I love them, to recognise what it is that I love.

I have tried so hard to explain what it means to be transgender. I’ve written poems and prose, made analogies and comparisons, intellectual arguments and philosophical positions. I’ve explained clinically, emotionally, psychologically, personally, objectively. And now I have to accept that this private part of my soul can never be understood or known. Even those with whom I have been most open, visible, vulnerable, for however long, will never really know.

And that is why I feel in my heart of hearts, that for most people, my transition will always be something I did, that I chose, that I elected to become – rather than something so innate that it has always been part of my being, my heart and soul. I no longer believe that I can say anything that could ever reach that level of knowing. If I could, maybe I would not lose the love I had; but I can’t. So I give up.

The importance of peripherals

It has to be of no consequence now what others think, or how they respond. I must simply live. And let go. It’s been ten months now, and those who don’t let go of me I shall be safe with. Those who do nothing as I do let go, aren’t good to hang onto. Those who think I have changed least are those closest to that private part of myself, those who think I have changed most are closest to my peripheral attributes.

And I also realise that I have to let go of those peripheral attributes too. One of these is ‘husband’. That’s easy, because it’s obvious and I never felt comfortable with the label: it presumed things that I didn’t want to be identified with in my love relationship. Another lies in things where I have led. I was a chair of governors for a school. I was lead trumpet in a band. I was a manager. I was active on many committees. I helped to lead a protest that took me all over the country and to Europe. Lots of things. Things I did naturally (and feel good about, to be honest), and that felt important at the time – in doing something worthwhile and being appreciated. I have very little of any of this left. It isn’t that I am nobody, just that the somebody I really am is here inside, in this privacy of the soul.

This week I have felt a bit battered by egos: people vying for position to be seen, heard, applauded, approved, included, better. All things I guess I have done too. And I have to let it all go, and say: sometimes it is enough just to be. Enough to be, even if there is no-one who loves you and to whom you are that really special person. (And there are so many trans people who lose their families.) I have to let go of what I was to others and dare to be alone, in the privacy of the soul. There, I have to learn, is enough security and resource, so long as I don’t compare myself with others. And enough to finally let go of everything I meant, to those who used to be closest to me.

I am nothing. I am everything.

For sure, I don’t ever want to find again that my peripherals are more loved than my essence. That sounds frightfully frightfully, doesn’t it? It just means that my sense of personhood matters far more than the clothes I wear or the profile of my body. Those things have to be congruent with my person, not the other way round. But I can never explain to you, if you have never known incongruence, that my peripherals do not define me, even if they are necessary for you to love me.

Giving up, letting go, walking away from people I never wanted to lose cannot be understood either. But I finally know I have to do it, and can, because I have come to accept that no-one else will ever understand what it is to be transsexual anyway. There is no more to say. I’m not walking away from love; I have withheld nothing. No, I’m walking away from only being accepted as something I am not.

The only way I can explain ‘blue’ to an unsighted person is by describing what it means to me. It matters not if I say the sky is blue, or give an electromagnetic frequency range. I can only say how blue is my favourite colour, it feels cool, or healing, or calm.

So as I walk away, as I let go, let me just say that knowing my gender is like ‘blue’ and I need to wear it. If you think you understand – if you want to – walk with me. You are most welcome.

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We have had enough

  • Posted on January 15, 2013 at 10:28 pm

This week I am deferring the next episode of ‘letting go’, which is due, and not writing about me at all. High time.

Last weekend, I am glad I wrote early, because everything went wild by Sunday. It had been a week in which Dr Curtis, the only private consultant on gender dysphoria, came under examination by the GMC as a result of a handful of complaints. The one lifeline for so many – and why? Because if the NHS in your neck of the woods is represented by blocking, ignorance or worse, you cannot find satisfactory diagnosis, let alone treatment for gender dysphoria. You don’t even get close to talking about it properly with a clinician.

The most positive outcome as that story circulated was a Twitter stream with the hashtag #TransDocFail representing personal accounts of treatment by, shall we say, ‘unsympathetic’ doctors or consultants. Thousands of accounts came through of not merely rejection but abuse, verbal and otherwise. And none of those complaints would be formally reported against GPs or even the Gender Identity Clinics across the land.

Why not? Well, if you have no other lifeline, no funds, and no desire to skip across to Thailand, you risk alienating yourself so far from the NHS that your hopes of receiving diagnosis and treatment are effectively ended. It’s almost an required attitude to keep your hood up and shuffle along silently in the queue so no-one notices you.

Then there was the offending remark in an otherwise excellent feminist article in The New Statesman by Suzanne Moore, regarding Brazilian transsexuals. We try not to offend minorities these days, and Suzanne I guess/hope didn’t mean to, or at best was thoughtless. She was picked up on it quite objectively, but quickly compounded the matter herself. And anger flared, because transgendered people have had enough.

We have managed to dispense with jokes that negatively stereotype races, disabilities, sexual orientation and much else, but, it seems, transgendered people are still fair game. Suzanne could have apologised straight away, but by digging her heels in a bit and becoming abusive, ended up being Tweeted back with some nasty comments, and making some more pretty nasty ones herself. And flounced off, ‘hounded out by a trans cabal’.

Good may yet come of it. Her journalist friend Julie Burchill wrote what must be the most hideous piece ever published, in The Observer, Sunday 13 January. I can’t link directly because a tsunami of protest from the early hours and lasting all day led to its removal online. Yes, that bad. PCC complaints, I don’t know how many letters to editors, countless Facebook comments and Tweets, and quite a few very good blogs from trans people, feminists and sane others. Basically, if Burchill had written a similar piece relating to Jews, gay people, black people, or even women, using such insulting, threatening and inaccurate terms, she might well have been arrested.

What better way to resolve this flashpoint then, than for The Daily Telegraph to republish the same article?!

This is not about an article any more though, it is about complex institutional and cultural transphobia, and it is now very plain to see, so a lot more people have encountered it than otherwise would. There is more to come, I am sure. A lot more.

You see, referring to Brazilian transsexuals means referring not just to beautiful people as a ridiculous ideal, but to beautiful people who are murdered there in hundreds simply for being trans. This is what cultural transphobia does. This is what respected journalists insulting and abusing trans people achieves: bolstering the opinions of the ignorant and resulting in abuse, discrimination and violence against trans people. This used to happen daily to gay and lesbian people, and sometimes still does, except in this country it is no longer commonly acceptable. We climbed out of the ‘no Irish, no blacks’ landlady culture a long time ago. But ‘no trans’ may just as well be posted by landlords, neighbours and employers (and some social groups) today.

This week I questioned the constant references to the ‘transgender community’ by asking why we don’t have a ‘red-haired community’ who we insult with ‘gingers’ or ‘carrot-tops’. (It used to happen in some places.) Community is unity in togetherness, and we cluster most tightly when in defence. There is a trans community because we are not widely accepted. Some like me, are very lucky, but very many more are not. This is why our abusers feel attacked by ‘the trans community’: it is because they abuse us. Criticise one person with red hair for daring to have red hair, and a community will not rise against you on Twitter or anywhere. Criticise one trans person for daring to be born with gender dysphoria, and you criticise us all.

It also occurred to me as the argument of ‘how dare you call me cis’ went on along the sidelines, that there was a time when people said ‘how dare you call me heterosexual’? The implication always being that ‘no, I am just normal. And that anyone not like me, gay, lesbian, red-haired or trans etc. is a freak.’ Well, all cis means is people whose gender and physiology are aligned – is that insulting? Maybe anyone in doubt should reflect on why they don’t like labels whilst applying them to others.

It is time to stop the othering of trans people, recognise that gender dysphoria is not about drag, fetish or sexual behaviour, and applaud the Dr Curtises of this world. On balance his benefit to the trans community is probably a lot better than that of the NHS as a whole. And it’s time to end the acceptability of editors and journalists to degrade a vulnerable sector of society, who are in part vulnerable because of them.

So much has been written, and much of it eloquently, in the last ten days, that surely the time has come. Because we have had enough.

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Anniversary, a new year reflection

  • Posted on December 27, 2012 at 8:33 pm

I started this blog one year ago. I wanted to tell my story as it was writing itself, I wanted to share my poetry, and I wanted to offer a concept of normality about the gender spectrum.

What a year it has been. In an early blog I did write ‘I don’t need to be a woman. I never really can be.’ The subtitle of my blog was ‘reinterpreting gender for a better fit’, and I was at pains to place myself in the centre, with a healthy balance between living one gender or the other depending on who needed that of me.

Meanwhile some people were taking one look at me and saying: ‘No way! She’s a classic transitioning one!’

That story is well told in the poetry collection I published in March: Realisations. I still read it and perform it and share it, as a closed book, but also a very emotional and poignant reminder of the traumatic thing it is to come to terms with being transgender.

So it was, that I applied in March 2012 by Deed Poll to change my name and gender marker for good, and as far as I am concerned, I transitioned then. The story of how it went is on here.

There is very little support though, for what ultimately is a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and even that term has been heartily discussed among psychiatrists and trans* people alike for its appropriateness, this year. Basically it is down to self-help. Somehow we meet each other, and if we are lucky, it’s a useful meeting. YouTube, feminisation secrets websites, borderline suppliers of herbal remedies and hormones, places you don’t normally associate yourself with because it’s easier to visit a ‘drag supplier’ than find genuine mastectomy prostheses. And it is expensive and painful, even before surgery. Despite 1 in 4,500 men and 1 in 8,000 women having diagnosable gender dysphoria.

So a year ago I had been toughing it out, convinced I could tread a middle ground, be dual gender, and keep my family. Yes, that is a pretty big reason to delay facing the truth. And the price of failure? Well, two things, I guess.

First (and mercifully we were going to therapy as a couple at the time) I reached the brink and looked over. It was a place devoid of everything, including light. It wasn’t inviting, but it seemed the only answer. If those who loved me and whom I loved the most could not live with me as a woman, and if I couldn’t live as a man, then by removing the common denominator (life) it would all be resolved. The frightening thing was that I knew how I was going to do it, and it was easy. So easy. I looked over the edge a few times. Now, I feel my record is blemished forever. ‘Have you ever felt suicidal?’ appears on forms sometimes, on your medical record, elsewhere. And if you answer ‘yes’, there may be a penalty, an impression, or just a knowing look and a Note. I have a Note. But at least I didn’t pay that price. The wind blew back just strongly enough to overcome the vertigo.

Second, I knew quite early in the year that I had already written the biggest cheque of my life. I had signed it. I had delivered it, and I was just waiting for it to be cashed. Very soon my account would be emptied. I wasn’t going to kill myself, but I was going to bankrupt myself. It isn’t often you have to write ‘Please pay from my personal account: my family; my marriage; the person I love most in all the world, all my life; and my home’ – in exchange for simply being true to how you were born.

I wrote on my blog about authenticity, about being seen as selfish or as deceiving, and I protested (as I still do) that I am looking through the same eyes I was born with and as when I fell in love, that I am still feeling and loving with the same heart, and giving from the same soul.

And I know now that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it matters not one jot. Being the bio-male really does trump personality, companionship, commitment. And love. If you aren’t sexually attractive any more, you have become inappropriate. ‘You might “be the same person”, but I am not having any woman make love to me (even if the outcome is pretty identical)’. The only resolution to living behind this thick glass wall, looking at the one I loved and could no longer touch, was either back to the first price tag above, or starting again on my own.

So this blog subtitle changed to simply being ‘observations of gender dysphoria’. There was no better fit. I was a woman, and I really could be. The observation bit is important to me, and I do try to see from others’ point of view, though of course I can only do it as myself. You can judge whether my empathy and intuition are sound or not. Along the way I wrote about fairness, truth, justice, fear, self-knowledge, continuity, being a trans* father, being ordinary – and quite a lot about love.

I digressed into the awful realisation that ignorance is no defense under law, and that if my gender had been known, every wonderful act of love (that I always felt was in my heart a feminine space) would not have been consented to: was it all rape? Is that too blunt? That my own wife had only ever had sex with a transsexual woman? And that she would never knowingly have given consent for that? Because now it was known, doing exactly what had been invited before, was more than inappropriate.

Sadness, exile, yet becoming accepted universally as a woman socially and at work, and in public performance, featured on this blog, and finally put paid to any efforts of rational persuasion that I am still me, not trying to love differently, and still deserving of the same love and intimacy – but came through in the end to an intensely happy realisation that I have arrived at a place where the final administration can proceed smoothly, and over time. I even ditched the prostheses, and am getting my hair coloured so as it grows and appears a bit, it will blend. Then in a few months, the miraculous ‘shorter trim’ can appear and another prop, hopefully, be left behind.

And so I arrived at Christmas with all the reminders, redrafted scripts of grief, opening my space to others who needed it for similar reasons, and ultimately when they had left for home, feeling terribly lonely.

But I did cook a full and quite perfect Christmas dinner for the first time ever. And yes, I did set out a Gantt chart so I would get it right: (do not genderise that! The multi-tasking was fine).

Soooo … deep breath, and let’s begin 2013, and see if we can avoid the trauma somewhat, let go completely, negotiate sale of my old home, navigate divorce, and keep myself together throughout again. Because contrary to everything I protested last year, and rejection for being different, there is only one me, there only ever has been, and this is what I am.

Sadly, in terms of finding those essential, safe, daily, dependable hugs or kisses (*sigh*), one ounce of truth seems to linger from one past blog, ‘We cry, we dance’:

In the land where all is pink and blue
the purple has no face.
We cry, we dance, we love like you—
but cannot find our place.

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Order, disorder, out of order

  • Posted on December 7, 2012 at 11:41 pm

Order and disorder are at the heart of gender perception. Putting things in order, arranging them in a logical or predictable way, means tidiness and ease of retrieval. Something is there when you want to find it, and when you are looking in the right place you don’t find something unexpected instead.

Order

Order is the way we don’t lose things. But if ever you have worked with databases (and I suppose if you haven’t, even a book with an index is a database) you come to realise that a table of contents isn’t enough. Order is complex, and most real-life databases are relational: in other words there are different kinds of relationships involved in their ordering, because there are different reasons for finding the same thing, and sometimes several things possibly meet the initial requirement. These relationships are: one-to-one – my cat is Suki, Suki is my cat. One-to-many – my Suki is a black cat, not all black cats are my Suki. Many-to-many – there are lots of cats called Tiddles, of all colours. Being too simple can be complicated: where shall I keep this key? With all keys in a key drawer? Or in a jar near where it is used? Or in my pocket because then it is always where it is needed? Or in the door, because security isn’t an issue and it saves time? What I want is for the key to be in all places (associated with keys in general, associated with the particular door, on my person in case I am outside), and that is why there are so many ‘see also’s in book indexes.

We are often very simplistic in ordering people too, according to our own need. This is the reason for racial segregation, for sex discrimination, why we stick to a particular religion, and why we have nationalist terrorists. It’s all about simple right order. Oh, and it’s why we name disorders, so they too become ordered. We love order, we need order, and we do so hate order to change – it is so disorienting.

Even I like order, and prefer it to disorder, but it does mean putting me in the ‘wrong’ place, compared with where I used to be, and that confuses. Where is that key? I’ve always kept it in the jar, and it’s not there! And yet when you find it, it is the right key, it is the same key. Someone may have borrowed it, put a useful coloured tab or keyring on it, it may have got rusty, but it still works. Where it is, how it is described or tagged, matters a whole lot less than what it is. It just helped you feel sure where to find it in the simplest possible way.

Unless you order your keys by coloured tabs, rather than the doors they open, that is. And I do so hate yellow tabs, they don’t go with anything I wear.

Disorder

I have a disorder, it seems. Officially it used to be called gender identity disorder, now gender dysphoria. But it has to be a disorder so that an orderly diagnosis can be written down, and so that in many parts of the world, insurance funding for the right medical support can be given. It must be one of the few disorders that is diagnosed as psychological and put in order solely by physiological intervention. So we cannot even properly locate the disorder.

My disorder means that my 56-year history of being here was described in some respects in the wrong way. I have always been dropped in the male jar, with male keys, and now I live in a prettier box, some people mislay me. It might be a pronoun mistake, it might be a deliberate misuse of the name I used to have, and which is legally no longer mine. Or it might be that I am staring them in the face but, because I am in the wrong order, they cannot see me – or that I am in a place they would rather not look because of what they think I am associated with! Order is actually as much what we are accustomed to and like, as what is right or best. Don’t we all keep something in a quite illogical place but never lose it? I don’t really have a disorder at all. In fact I am very ordered; I just place myself in order (the best I can find) according to my preference, not yours.

And this is why people who are differently-gendered generally do not like the term ‘disorder’.

Loss of order

The worst thing that can happen in the orderedness of a relational database (where one tag can belong to many things) is not that a tag gets lost, but that it gets confused with another and things become insufficiently distinguished and separable. How do you know, if you start retagging and reclassifying from scratch, that you are putting the order back the way it was? I am not about to say that order does not matter, only that our gender tags are in many-to-many relations, and that ideas of gender order and disorder are not as simple as we have come to like. But we are so afraid of losing that unique tag, and the whole thing falling apart! It is a very conditioning fear too.

We are all in a conditioned place, where I am incredibly comfortable with myself in a way I never was, but where things are a bit awkward when people think I am still disordered (see De Facto, Defect or Defector). And because others are conditioned too, it does not matter to some that the key still fits the lock. The tag is the wrong colour. And the consequence of that is that I am not in the jar any more, and if I am in the pretty box, it is better not to use me.

Official order out of order

This month has seen more furore over the American Psychiatric Associations’s ‘bible’, the revised fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Love of, and some necessity of, order has led to a limited amount of reorganisation of gender identity disorder (GID) into gender dysphoria, and removing it from the section on sexual disorders. But imagine you are born with a dysfunctional limb and you are defined and diagnosed as having a psycho-appendicular disorder? And instead of being sent to a bone specialist you are sent to a psychiatrist? That’s what my sense of gender is like: I do not have a mental disorder. I have a problem with the way my body developed.

Next week I visit a gender identity clinic for the first time. It has taken an inordinately long time to get to this first appointment, and my body has been changing nicely in the meantime, and I have retreated a long way from the edge of the big black inviting pit my mind was sometimes dragged towards. I am OK now, thank you, and I like the way my body is responding. I am very ordered. The clinic? Part of a Mental Health trust. My appointment? With a psychiatrist.

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Familiar

  • Posted on December 5, 2012 at 11:39 pm

You have become my most familiar stranger,
and stranger still my most familiar friend.

Except that we may not speak without memory,
nor remember without speaking exception.

You look my way—ask after me—as if it mattered,
matted strands of friendship, lying, unexamined.

 

Do not touch me—that’s near enough to be—
or to be not, lest touching reminds, feels strange.

Disassemble me again with un-love, lay me out,
in all my parts for choosing not to reassemble me.

I don’t know what you have become, except
you remind me of a time I knew a stranger.

 

It seems stranger to see just part, excluded now,
excepted from friendship, not quite stranger enough.

Friendship, as progressive, is slipping backwards,
into a time before even the way I thought, was new.

Before the way I loved was lovely, coming as it did
from everything I am, before you knew the way I am.

 

In becoming familiar to myself, unfamiliar to you
you have become my most familiar, absent, friend.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

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