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A love less ordinary: Laura Newman

  • Posted on November 24, 2012 at 10:58 pm

This weekA Love Less Ordinary; Laura Newman I turned up a scanned article someone helpfully sent me ages ago. It was about Helen Boyd and Betty in the early days. Great! There was Betty doing Helen’s make-up, and then Betty resting her head lovingly on Helen’s shoulder. This was a love less ordinary, surely?

I was desperate, when I began to realise that my big unknown was gender dysphoria, to read, to buy books, to share the coming-to-understand. Desperate to show it wasn’t just me, in the hope that understanding would preserve the love in my partnership. I bought, as so many, My Husband Betty by Helen Boyd. We read it. It’s a great book.

The article has a pull-quote that says if Betty were ever to head for physical transition, their marriage would be over.

A trans friend asked if I had read the second book, She’s not the Man I Married. I wasn’t sure about doing that. It is in some ways the book of doubts. It’s the story of the uncertainty and impending change, it’s about love, identity and sexuality. One chapter is titled ‘Genitals are the least of it’. Phew! Could that be true? But it is about the period during which Betty had yet to commit to surgical reassignment (or correction). And the book ends still with all the fuzziness of not really knowing all that marriage and a trans partner implies, and whether Helen would still be the same Helen if Betty were ‘really’ to be just Betty. It was not a reassuring book to share, honest as it was.

Here was Helen full of doubts but full of love, accepting that her charming man she fell in love with was just an illusion.

My friend then said: ‘You know Betty has transitioned now?’ And if I remember rightly, I later read that Helen’s subsequent sentiment that has kept them together and campaigning, is that she just wanted still to be waking up with the person she has always loved most. But that isn’t in the book.

How many times did I say, usually in tears and fear: ‘You can walk away from this. I can’t!’? Hoping that the answer would be ‘I could never do that!’

There isn’t a third book, and we worked our way through personal stories, case studies of diverse lives, academic research. In fact most of the serious stuff you could get. It is all shot through with love, in the end, being the least of it, and why: that staying with a trans person erodes your own personality, identity, sexual certainty. That love is not – cannot be – enough.

There was nothing to say: ‘Hold on, this can work out. If this person [my trans partner] can go through so much, face such change, so much fear and pain, and retain self-identity, dignity and sense of self, stronger than ever – then maybe I can too.’

The new book: A Love Les Ordinary

Laura Newman’s book A Love Les Ordinary: sharing life, laughter and handbags with my transgender partner heads straight for this corner. It isn’t just the challenge of having – being known to have – a trans partner, it is that you can lose yourself in all the pressures and expectations of life anyway, and it is often the trans partner who shows the greatest honesty, strength and courage to be true to self. What if we were all able to do that? What if the issues aren’t about the trans partner, but about knowing that you are free to live life the way you should be, not just playing roles and meeting expectations? What makes a wonderful relationship? The sex you always thought correct? The ‘orientation’ you feel most fitting or comfortable with? No. It is one in which you know and love yourself with such honesty that you can be all you are with another who can do the same, regardless. Because then there is no compromise, no sell-out, no resentment that the other is preventing you being all you are. It doesn’t mean no give and take, it just means you both know it’s there and have agreed it freely. And it doesn’t mean no change, but that you can accept it together.

Maybe this harks back to something I wrote a long while back about other people not actually changing you, about honesty, and about how loving a person who never really was the ‘opposite’ but now shows it, doesn’t suddenly make you gay or lesbian.

The core of this understanding of love is that you cannot love another unless you love yourself, but that when you do, love matters more than any expectations.

You may have been told that already, through: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (which is only a minimum requirement – you can end up hating yourself and therefore your neighbour!), or through the Buddhist tenet of lovingkindness needing you to love yourself first. But Laura demonstrates how this works out in a good relationship, how it makes a great relationship, and why being fully, honestly yourself is therefore a prerequisite.

There is surprise when I explain to others that, given the choice to have my lover and my family and my home back, with 40 more healthy years of life ahead, in exchange for living as a man – or to be the woman I am on medications that could endanger my life, and alone – that the latter is the only thing I could ever do. I can only love from who I am, loving myself as I am.

Laura’s book is not for trans people. It is mainly for women facing unconventional relationships, and the quandry of loving someone others would not respect you for. What does it do to you, and why does it do anything to you at all? Laura does address sexuality, but again, if you loosen your understanding of gender, perhaps you can just as easily adjust your understanding of what it means to love someone who looks more like you.

This book is not about accepting trans people or any special dispensation, it is about how two people can make a wonderful loving partnership through knowing themselves equally, so that they can give love unconditionally. There are amazing possibilities here, for any love relationship, and Laura’s earlier experience with an insecure transvestite left a significant foundation for starting a very different relationship. Helen Boyd also knew she was dating a cross-dresser from the start. I shall shortly review Emma Canton’s If You Really Loved Me properly too, so all three books of successful survival were neither taken by surprise after a long and happy marriage, nor unrelentingly heterosexual.

A Love Les Ordinary is a really valuable addition to the reading list for partners who have to come to terms with what it means to love someone who is transgendered. It does not go so far as to address the implications of a partner who is transsexual, but even there it is a good start. And it should be thrust into the hands of anyone who says they cannot understand how you could actually love, let alone be intimate with, someone transgendered.

I am still waiting for the book that says how a spouse can unconditionally love a partner who comes to terms with their gender rather late on, without losing their own sense of self. It is probably something to do with the realisation that they have happily loved a person not knowing that so much of what they appreciated came from something they would never have chosen. But I do know of a small number of marriages that have continued on the basis of ‘they are still the same person (not “man”) I married’.

When it is written, I hope still to be around to review it, because it would be such useful reading. Meanwhile, I am just longing for a love less ordinary.

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Transgender relativity

  • Posted on November 18, 2012 at 8:35 am

Now, let me guess; what is this blog going to be about? Ah! That when you’re transitioning, you can’t travel faster than the speed of light. Sadly true, but no!

OK… I know! Matter and energy can be equated: when something really matters to you, you have boundless energy to achieve it? Again, there’s truth in that, but no.

Alright; it’s just a neat way of speaking about families as quanta? That bonds only have statistical probabilities? Or the fact that you can’t be two things at once – but really you can? Or that the gravity of transitioning is a function of the space you fill and the time it takes?

No. It’s going to be about relating. It’s about people together, how they interact, and some of the reasons for that. I’m not being academic about it, just observing. Just sayin’…

We spend a lot of time talking about relating as families, as friends, as more than friends, as partners.

As far as family are concerned, I have just become a daughter. I love it. My mum may never really come to grips with it, because it may just be too late, too many years of being one thing. A daughter? It’s just relative. I have become a sister too. Again, it has changed the way I feel I relate. I like it; it works. I will always have fathered children, and I have covered this before. It is the most difficult, because I will never be a mother. If possible, I just want to be Andie, who still is a parent, out of the zone of dependency, admiring my children, and simply wanting recognition and respect, and a desire to understand how I was born the way I was. Maybe one day. My family was always relatively small. Now it is relatively smaller.

Family relationships are built to a large extent on roles. Those roles change anyway through phases of life, but this change has not in fact changed roles.

To some friends I have become an honorary sister, which I find lovely, wholly accept and am finding a new richness in. I can go out with another woman, and there really is nothing in it, except the privilege of sisterhood. We can even talk about relationships, or cry, or laugh. Or all three at once. To other friends we just carry on as before, with pronoun changes, maybe a change in what jokes may be acceptably presented to me, but relatively unchanged.

I don’t have a partner, so I can’t say much here. But I know, having expanded into my natural space, how I relate will be different – if it ever happens again.

Something’s cooking

One book I bought when moving into my own place was Delia Smith’s One is Fun. (For those too young or not habitually in the kitchen: recipes for the single person.) Does being single make cooking fun? I actually enjoy cooking now I get to do it. (OK, have to do it.) In fact I like it so much I think I may have discovered pan-sexuality.

And yes, I missed one out from my list: ‘more than friends’.

Many trans* people, on losing the rigidity or binary nature of gender, or at least of the binding of physiology and mind/soul, come to realise the paradoxes of sexuality. If gender is fluid, or non-binary, or detached from the genitals, so may sexuality. It does not mean you don’t know what you are, but you might not know straight away, and you might yet be surprised. For a number of trans* people, sexual intimacy is simply what can ensue with someone you really love. So this woman has a penis? And this man used to have breasts? Is it still intuitively wrong because you are not gay, or not lesbian? It isn’t wrong any more – or rather, it isn’t inappropriate any more, because you let go the matrix and go with your feelings. Love is expressed with what you have got. Hence a steer towards pansexuality. ‘What sex are you really?’ loses its basis in what you see. Love, trust and respect take over from ticking the standard boxes.

The nature of attraction can change for all sorts of reasons: you love a woman more than you used to a man, or vice versa, and find heterosexuality wasn’t as anchored as you thought. You want to express love rather than have the ‘right kind’ of sex. But is doesn’t always change, and there is no scale of predictability. And I do recognise that hormones play a role, either shutting them off or taking them in. But again, not predictably.

It’s still all relative.

And the sense of what you are is still influenced by what people think or say you are. I still have to fully come to terms with the difference between how I feel and what others see. I may get up in the morning and go to work without an ounce of doubt that I am a woman. Once there, a new employee may take one look at me and ask someone else why that woman over there looks a bit different. Isn’t there something about her? Yes. She used to be a man. Frankly, that is what most people will say. Am I a woman? Or just a woman who used to be a man? Is it all just relative? To me, no.

Paradoxes of relativity – and surprise

Trans* relativity can be an enduring discomfort, which is part of why some realise they can never quite be what they want to be, despite all available treatments and surgery. We are who we are, and we are what we are, and some people will never treat those two equally. They may want one, but not the other. For so many, this is the one point at which the marriage vows become very relative too. All that I, am I give? All that I have, I share? Except you didn’t mention the just cause or impediment, and had I known, I would have given, shared, and promised nothing. You broke the contract by being yourself. But what are you? A ‘real’ man? A ‘real’ woman? Or just a woman who used to be a man? Doesn’t it scare you just a little bit when you read your marriage vows, however they were phrased? Aren’t they just impossibly unconditional? What hope of ever exchanging such grand promises to anyone ever again?

If I could change my skeleton for a female one, of course I would. Instead I choose clothes that make the most of a bad job. And as far as I can, I don’t even think about what I ‘used to be’, because that was just the outside. My heart and soul are the same. What I can give is the same. The way I love is the same. Sex? As always, unchanged, I will be loving and generous with what I have, even though what I have will also change. So who wants my love, and does it matter how relative my ‘woman’ is?

As an observer of my transitioning life, I am always as surprised as anyone. The acceptance I have found, from women especially, has at times overwhelmed me. I am one too; welcome to the sorority. Male acceptance? Sometimes cool. But for me, the worst part is the men who having asked, treat me as the woman who used to be a man. Used to be a man, will understand the humour, the suggestion, the sex/gender edginess, the mindset. Sorry guys; it never was my mindset, so don’t put that one on me now either.

And my biggest surprise? That the person who has made me feel most authentic as a woman – is a man.

It’s all a matter of relativity.

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Performance and poetry

  • Posted on October 30, 2012 at 11:25 pm

Andie Davidson, Polari, October 2012When I began my journey away from anger at aspects of myself and hatred of what felt so wrong about being me, I came to appreciate that just saying what I felt wasn’t really helpful. I say this, you say that, we disagree. I feel this, you feel that and we are hitting each other emotionally. I was not being fact, I was not being statement; I was being something inexpressible, I was being the emotion of self-realisation. We don’t have to go there much, do we? Life works, we sit tight. How could I say what was going on, and why it was becoming so important, so urgent? Poetry for me was a subversion of logic, the unspeakable, said with elegance, read until you realised your answers had already been undercut, and yet the playfulness of the language had strung you along. Maybe I overstate what I was doing. But I’m not so sure.

Last night I had been invited to present some of my poetry at a Polari evening at the Royal Festival Hall. No, not the big one! Just the 100-seater function room overlooking the London Eye, into which some musical performance and applause occasionally wafted. Anyhow, it took me back to my poetry collection RealIsations to select some key pieces along with some new ones. For me the book was a chapter now closed, and interesting to reopen after being left to rest.

The fears, as well as all the hopes, are long gone. I transitioned and began life exclusively as a woman seven months ago, and before that for a year, I had been doing so less and less covertly for at least three days a week. So I was recalling emotions largely dealt with, and able to appreciate the artistry I had achieved in the writing. I couldn’t just stand there and read this stuff: it was laden. But at least now I could get to the end of the poems without tearing up. I am quite new to poetry in many ways. I have written all my life, sporadically, and often wanted to read expressively to convey the intent. And so I am used to thinking about how I read, and how to carry meaning best when, at least in a lot of my work, there are many layers.

My lounge has become accustomed to dance, so without cats to embarrass, I could practice moving towards performance in my poetry. Polari is a somewhat flamboyant context, so all I knew was that this was something I desperately wanted to do, and do well. Did I? It was exciting. It was amazing. To be me as I now am, in this place, with these well-established, award-winning authors, doing this, and hitting the right buttons.

I am sure I can improve; there isn’t much one gets right first time in the creative arts, but it was such a powerful experience for me, I know I really must do this again. I loved it. This was me, reaching my best as a writer, at last, in a place where literature is appreciated, where being transsexual, if not understood, is at least recognised as an accepted minority identity. Other people might use a phrase such as ‘it blew my mind’, but I am less extravagant. It was another piece of self-understanding, that this is actually an important part of who I am.

It has taken me 24 hours so far to try and come down from the high, and I am back at work in the morning working on technical writing and operator manuals and the mechanisms of keeping them well maintained. A world away. But inside here, my heart is beating with the thrill of everyone who showed their personal appreciation of what was, to date, the performance of my life.

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One day

  • Posted on October 15, 2012 at 12:01 am

One day you will say:
I was married.
To a man who could do anything.
He could draw, paint and make things.
He even made our bed and everything
was fixed.

He was kind.
He wouldn’t even argue properly.
There was no drinking, no mates
to lead him astray on Friday nights.
And no woman to delight him
more than me.

He taught me
that my body could be wonderful.
He worshipped at my fount and gladly
gave without taking in return.
We shared everything and learned
what life was.

He was mine.
And I thought I knew him so well.
Someone who had a mind about life
who knew what was important.
And who would fight a cause just
because it was right.

One day you will say:
I was married.
To a man who loved me simply
for who I am, and who never gave up.
But I had to bury his love and leave
everything behind.

He was kind.
He taught me and he was mine.
But inside he was a woman, like me.
And I cannot love a woman who fixes
everything, makes beds, worships me,
is not a man.

I have learned
the importance of a man who cannot
do everything, fix anything, has mates and
who will forget me Friday night, shun causes,
love me for what I am—and will allow me to be
the woman.

2012 © Andie Davidson

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Who do people say that I am?

  • Posted on October 13, 2012 at 8:07 am

These are not moments of doubt, but such utter self-conviction it matters that it is shared. But can anyone else really understand who I am?

I work in an office of men, so sometimes the conversation is jokeily blokeily. It isn’t offensive, though sometimes a bit close to that edge. Would they really say those things if the majority present were senior women? I find myself reacting not differently (I always hated the way men talk often about women), but more overtly. And it leaves me wondering if I am accepted as being ‘the woman who is really a man’. So it’s OK; she will understand, and maybe join in. She’s been there, she’s not sensitive like real women.

Sorry guys. I am not one of you, and my relief at not being one of you is profound. It is a thankfulness that I cannot describe. I haven’t become misandrist, and I don’t see you as misogynist. No, you are just still in the mindset ‘male as default’ – the obvious supremacy of the male. Women are just like that. Men are just like that. Aren’t they?

I don’t feel humoured, I just know there is a point where people give up following you. For all the courage they say I have to be different (do I have a choice?), or to set an example in going for what is true to myself against all odds, I feel that they will always say: ‘Andie? Yes she’s the transsexual. Used to be a man.’ Not a real woman. Not really who I say I am.

The same happens when people talk about relationships and love. There are those who expect me to seek romance with another trans* person – well it would just be easier, wouldn’t it? And aren’t you being a bit transphobic if you say you wouldn’t? Or those who have said I shall always be ‘somewhere in the middle’. And I try to reply that I am not part of some community that lives together out of a sense of shared identity or for self-preservation; that I am normal, that I am a woman, just one with a different history.

The more I follow my truth, the more my past dissolves. I had a recurrent dream the other night, only this time I was playing the same part as a woman. Even when I have shaken off consciousness, I no longer perceive myself as a man. What could be more lovely?

And yet I still feel, when other people relax their thinking, they do not do the same. They are really very good indeed with pronouns, the acceptance, the inclusion – mostly. And yet am I really ‘one of the girls’ to the women around me? Or still, underneath, ‘one of the men’? Or just an honorary guest for both?

What will it take, I wonder, for people to look at me and see who I am, not as something changed, but as the essential, genuine, whole me? To go beyond their rationalisation of what I have gone through, and not to need a rationalisation at all, just to be seen as who I am.

I have elsewhere remarked this week a shared observation amongst trans friends: that social transition (the whole-life leaving behind of a gender identity you were given) increases your gender dysphoria rather than relieving it. At one level you are doing everything you can and feeling a fulfilment you could never have imagined. You don’t even feel certain parts of your body any more for most of the time, and other parts you become very much more aware of. And then you catch yourself in a mirror undressed and know something is still dreadfully wrong, and can do nothing.

The people I am waiting for at a gender clinic see people like me every day. We are physiological males or females wanting surgery to change that. They see us, they go home, they have lives to live. I don’t think they can imagine what it is like as months and years go by, to feel worse each day we present and live more confidently. Outwardly they see a success; a ‘real life experience’ going well, following the pathway. There are too many of us to cope with, and anyway, we aren’t ill are we, so what are we complaining about? But inside I am thinking: every day you go home, and my referral forms lie yet another day in your intray, waiting for someone to transfer paper to computer, computer to diary, just to let me know the day you will begin to talk to me – a bit of me is screaming louder just to be heard. For who I am.

Who do you say that I am?

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