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Je ne regrette rien

  • Posted on April 9, 2012 at 8:23 pm

We all regret a lot, but today’s Guardian (UK) listed Top five regrets of the dying, and these should be our regrets before it’s too late. Why not regret them now, while we can do something about it? The five included ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’, which meant a lot to me.

So what did people expect that held me back? None of us knew, actually. It’s mostly in retrospect, as I looked at the pieces and put the jigsaw together, that I realised that I had done everything ‘right’ in the wrong way. I have been a breadwinner – and a successful one, I was a father figure – albeit a gentle one, and a good and faithful husband – albeit a feminine one inside. But I wore the clothes and presented myself in a way that I now know was uncomfortable because it made me look right to everyone else, but meant I never felt I really fitted in like that. Square pegs do fit in round holes, so long as the diagonal is the diameter. But after a while, either the corners start to wear, or the circle starts to catch. The friction got too much, and everyone else got confused, except for me, because I understood at last.

Yesterday I wasted a lot of time in great anxiety (I am a bit of a perfectionist) because my wife remarked that this blog site ‘didn’t look like that᾿ to her. Oh no! It’s been looking wrong all this time! I live on Firefox, Safari, Chrome – any browser except Internet Explorer (IE). Now Microsoft may be big, but it does sometimes live in a world of its own, and when it comes to certain standards (CSS if you know what that means) it likes to do something different. My beautiful orchids were obscured, the page ranged left, pictures pushed out of place, simply because one little instruction that means everything to everyone doesn’t to Internet Explorer. I tracked it all down, fixed it, learned something new, and now everyone can see my pages as they are supposed to look. Microsoft had been expecting me to absorb all their quirks, and I had been beautifully doing my own thing. There was no real gain, and I didn’t write anything useful all day, all that happened was that I was looking right to everyone at last.

Sometimes you think from the inside that you are doing everything right. Others see something different and think that is how you are supposed to look. Sometimes you give up: you could read my blog before on IE and ignore things being in the wrong place, or just think I wasn’t very good at web design! In the same way, you could look at me as a man before, and think I was just a bit unconventional or not good at having friends. Now I am as I should be (or on the way) people are confused. They got to live with the square peg because it fitted, or the skewed page because it could be read, or the bloke because he worked OK like that. I realise I wasn’t doing anything the way I was because I was a man, I was just being me, and if was doing things from a female perspective I thought it was normal. It was being seen and expected to be male that fitted everyone else’s expectations – except mine. And that’s why I keep saying: ‘but I’m still here! I am still just being me, just filling a bigger space differently!’ and everyone else says I am not fitting their expectations any more.

A little while ago a trans friend said to me with utter conviction: ‘I just don’t want to die a man!’

Back to the top. I have to be true to myself, because the cost of not doing so will be that regret on my dying breath, and I have a life to live that doesn’t belong to anyone else.

It kinda makes sense of my obscure Eostre poem on here. I don’t have to deny my life to date, it doesn’t have to die, and I am not ashamed of any of it. There is no dying and rising for my male life here to rescue me from evil – just a coming to life, a dawning, of my female life as a just fulfilment.

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What’s dis for ’ere?

  • Posted on April 6, 2012 at 9:32 am
Even early on in realising that being trans was just the way things were, I never had a problem telling people and trying to explain. For all the rudeness it will never get better unless we also inform.

He wasn’t stupid.
He just misheard in innocence.
I tried to explain my skirt but he stared
at my handbag beside his beer.
What’s dis for, ’ere?
That’s my handbag, I said.
It goes with my gender.
But you’re a bloke, yeah?
Well, yes and no.
(Do I look like one, I mean, really?)
It’s just that when you say man or woman
you leave no space in between.
And that’s where I am.
Yeah, but I could tell,
so why do you do it?
Because it just feels right.
Do you like that t-shirt?
I pointed to the alcoholic brand.
He laughed.
Yeah, that’s why I’m ’ere!
Why am I here?
I sat with him because he jeered.
He wanted friends to know
he was the quick and clever
spotter of trannies on the street.
I could never wear a shirt like that.
Would your girlfriend?
Nah, it’s all flowers and stuff for ’er.
But you wouldn’t mind?
S’pose it would be cool.
And go with her jeans?
Well, yeah, but that’s dif’rent innit?
So we’re all a bit different really
and girls can be boys?
Yeah, but not the other way round,
I mean, it’s, well, girly.
And I don’t feel laddish;
it’s not what’s inside me, so
this is what you see.
Like I said, it’s ‘dys-phor-ia’,
gender dysphoria:
I’m just uncomfortable as a man.
Still don’t understand, mate.
No, he never will.
I take my bag and smile.
Maybe I should have given him a miss.

2011©Andie Davidson

This and other poems on transgender are in my collection from Bramley Press: Realisations.

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Identity

  • Posted on April 4, 2012 at 5:49 pm

Identity is another word that is perhaps as hard to define as gender. I remember when ‘identify with’ was a new phrase that caused some difficulty with grammarians and any of us who couldn’t quite understand it because we never thought we’d ever done it.

Fascinating though, because identity isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I am who I am (isn’t that Yahweh’s response to Moses?). I think, therefore I am: Descartes. How could I be anything or anyone else?? I have found myself telling people recently that rather trite thing: ‘just be yourself; no-one else can do it as well as you can!’ But it is true – isn’t it?

After yesterday’s blog about the self(ish) half-life, I have been thinking more about identity. My desperately synthesizing brain hoovers up things I hear or see, and among today’s flotsam are a deed poll form on my desk saying who I am, my LinkedIn world where puzzlement reigns over the ex-colleague who doesn’t look quite the same but does all the same things, and my Facebook page which isn’t my face any more inviting people to transition to my other page. It’s also an unformed poem that will arrive one day that says ‘I᾿m still here’.

If you wear glasses you will know that feeling of the first time you could see again properly, and then got so used to them you found yourself looking for them when they were already on your nose! And yet everyone else said: ‘there’s something different about you …’ and couldn’t quite place it. The view from the inside was the same, but clearer. The appearance from the outside may have seemed quite strange. Fancy dress parties can give you very uncomfortable feelings too, and your sweet darling child in a grotesque hallowe’en mask can be very disturbing. Change your gender presentation, and all that you are is subsumed by what your identity does to someone else’s identity.

I have to admit this took me by surprise: that my identity, with which I had struggled for so long on the inside, but which I felt only found understanding rather than change, had actually shaped other people’s identities too. Perhaps that is my truth: was I was so good at being a man because I was shaped by all those identities around me? Like stress-balls packed tightly in a box, the memory of shape is only revealed when taken out. I came out and found my shape – but those I was packed in with most tightly then also found their true shape, and it didn’t always fit with mine any more! Had I really shaped their identity and stopped them being true to self? I say that about me, so perhaps I should not be surprised after all.

I feel different living now as I do, but I don’t feel that I am different. The ‘what’ of my presentation and declared identity is no more to me in some ways that the glasses I first put on to make me normal again. I am still here, looking out, and the ‘who’ is completely unchanged, except for the joy of restoration to a single identity instead of one that was increasingly split. The same eyes, the same hands, the same terrible jokes but the same gentle humour; the same concerns, attitudes and fears; the same loves, the same aspirations to live a good life, the same courage to do what’s right. The same needs. Nothing I ever did that felt best in life was because I was a man. The suit might have been impressive, the feelings of not belonging in male-dominated meetings was not. And yes, let’s be personal, sex for me is a pooling of resources, an equal sharing, never a male dominance, never done because of my apparent gender, never because of the body I was given.

And yet for all that, gender is such a powerful thing when identified, that other than for my own sense of identity, I have to the external world lost my identity and gained another that is completely different, and that needs to be assessed all over again for validity, for preference, for befriending or for unfriending. The deed poll says it, LinkedIn says it, Facebook says it, even my family says it. It must be true; there, my passes no longer work, and hang around my neck useless and irreplaceable. The pictures, the names, the codes of acceptance, the permissions to enter: all these externals, in the end are regarded as my identity, not the me that I am inside that has simply come home and finally belongs only to find some people have, well, just gone home too. But my door is always open, because it always has been. It’s part of my identity to be like that.

The poem in the adjacent post to this (Losing my touch) was a vision I had of returning to an old familiar place and finding it shut down and deserted behind a chain-link fence. You’ll get the gist, but I just thought as a poem it worked quite well too.

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Selfish. Self(ish). Self.

  • Posted on April 2, 2012 at 11:47 pm

As my wife reaches for the cheese and asks for the grater, my mind switches into immediate lowest-level punning: ‘Grater love has no man …’ Nobody laughs, it isn’t funny, just a vain attempt to lighten things up. But it’s a reminder that St Paul did say that there is no greater love shown than to lay your life down for a friend. Great in battle. But would you (other than instinctively) jump under a bus to push someone out of the way? How good a friend would they have to be? So good you hope they might survive but, if not, at least you’d go together?

The worst choice I can imagine is when a lifelong partnership is switched from equality and easy unconditionality into self-preservation. One partner is struck down through no fault or misdeed of their own. What should the other do?

My dread question about being transgender, married and with a family, is why anyone should ever have to decide between self-authenticity and the greatest love in their life. How can anyone possibly decide that? Gender is so incredibly powerful that it defines who and what you are. Once you realise that you do not have the heart and soul of a man, you really, truly, cannot go on in mimicry of being a man. To do so would be so diminishing of self that you would not truly be able to love freely and unconditionally yourself. Whether it is the Christian ‘love you neighbour as yourself’, or the Buddhist Metta Bhavana that begins with your own happiness and well-being, we know that loving people now and love themselves and that bitter, angry people do not.

So what do you do? Jump under the bus so the loved one doesn’t have to face the consequences, or stand on the kerb while your gender bus runs them over? I don’t honestly think anyone who hasn’t faced such an identity crisis can imagine how such a situation can arise.

And it is all about self.

Self

Have you ever even needed to think about self, about what and who you are and perhaps why? Or do you live an altrusitic life, saving little for yourself – giving, thoughtless of return? Or like most of us, do you invest, with friends, with family, with certain material things – just so you feel physically and emotionally equipped to give generously to others and find enough space to replenish and do it again? How much sense of self do you have – not just things you can do, your personality, how you get along – but in the long dark reaches of the night, or in the ecstasy of a peak achievement? Being transgender forces you to find truths most people never even know to look for. We see differently because we have to.

I don’t think many of us believe to a great extent in self-denial. After all, we are precious beings, whether or not we sense a place in anything greater or numinous or spiritual. We need enough of self in order to be giving, in order to empathise, in order to understand what it is like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. We need self simply to love at all.

I need a sense of self, a bit of self-actualisation if you like, if I am to fulfill any purpose in being human.

Self(ish)

Anything less is to fall into a grey zone of being self(ish) – never quite realising what it’s all about, just making headway, doing enough, staying alive, keeping out of trouble. Am I being self(ish)? I hope not! It is neither as noble as being a self-denialist, nor as ruthless as being selfish, but it surely isn’t what we are here in this life for. If we all do nothing but put ourselves behind everyone else, the queue or front line, whatever, simply recedes forever in a false etiquette of ‘after you; no, after you!’

So if I stand ahead of another to pay for my milk (OK, or beer) is that an act of selfishness? Again, I don’t think so. It is in my interests to pay when it’s my turn, but it is also in my family’s interests that I arrive home before letting everyone else (presumably happy to be selfish) go first. It would be selfish to jump the queue as if I was more privileged or important a person.

Selfish?

OK, you know what I’m getting at. I realised – I finally gave in and stopped fighting – I am transgender. I do not fit the picture or the presumption always given about the nature of my self. For me, it is an awareness in episodes, an understanding in retrospect, from over 40 years. That is a long time to be only self(ish), and I’m not exactly jumping the queue out of a sense of self-importance now. I am gradually emerging, asserting who and what I am, trying to find the kindest way to become whole.

And yet I am not the first to be thought of as selfish: how dare I think I can be transgender and upset so many lives by being myself? How could I have lived so long out of my true self that I couldn’t continue in self-denial? It’s so selfish to have a self! Yes: I should jump under the bus so the bus is stopped.

As if, just because self is at our centre, we are therefore self-centred.

It’s all about life choices, and things you do not have a choice about. After that it’s about other people’s choices; personal and moral. It’s about their self, their self(ish) compromises, and selfishness. We can all, in anger, misunderstanding, loss and grieving, think of each other as selfish as we face a new perspective on our own self, realised for what it is, hardened from self(ish)ness into true self.

Choice

I do not feel I have a choice if I am to be true to my self. It is no more choice than a disability or an injury that was completely not my fault. The problem is that in the case of the latter, loyalty and commitment kick in and override everything else. It isn’t a kind thing that a partner or relative ends up as a carer, but we sort of expect both might find some fulfilment in making the most of circumstances. And yet it isn’t necessarily reprehensible that some potential carers simply know they cannot cope, and third party accommodation and care is found instead. We might say ‘for better, for worse, for richer for poorer’ but do we really feel bound by that any more? No. Some caring is just too much. For all the love we want to show, it just isn’t adaptable enough. This is fact, not bitterness; many cared-for do not wish to be a burden, because they know how it would feel the other way round. But the person with MS in the wheelchair, the soldier with no legs, or the child with cerebral palsy – they are not being selfish. A little help, a lot of love, and their lives can still be rich, self can still be actualised as far as possible. Their greatest fear is to be only self(ish) and not to be loved. So what does it mean to love them while still retaining a clear sense of self? What does it mean to love a transgender person, when you know they are simply finding themselves, and your own assumptions about love, sex and gender are dropped into the melting pot?

That is one question that I cannot answer.

But I hope all my friends and family and colleagues will think more deeply about self, about being self(ish) and realise that I am not being selfish by understanding a little too late that I am really not the man they thought I was. I made a good enough job of it, I think. But I have resigned. And I cannot imagine any act of selfishness that could give rise to so many hurdles and such loss of entitlement, and grief, despite the relief and joy of finding myself. No-one would choose, in the context of this gender-binary society, ever to be transgender, except to be true to self.

Those of you who venture into Realisations can now read ‘Not like a bone’ in context.

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What is a sense of gender?

  • Posted on March 28, 2012 at 5:29 pm

A section in my book Realisations is called ‘A Sense of Gender’, and it is a really curious thing. What is it to be self-aware of being a man or being a woman? Is it just a feeling of consonance with others who have bodies like yours? Or perhaps dissonance with those who don’t? That seems a bit thin somehow. I am sure that with a bit of research I could unearth psychological studies that would dip into the gendered mind, the ways we think, that place us more comfortably in one camp or the other. Except that drags us kicking into the binary conflict that simply doesn’t suit everyone.

Early in realising who I really was, I used to play this mind game: if it was a ‘Manday’ rather than a ‘Chooseday᾿ and I closed my eyes against what I was wearing, how did I feel? Hmm. Nothing really. And to begin with in my female clothes I looked as different to myself as I would to any friend. Not bad, but certainly different. Did that make me feel more like a woman and less like a man underneath? Well, it helped.

Close the eyes. Ask: what does it mean for anyone to feel like a man / woman?

There is a physical awareness, perhaps a bra wire is digging in or trousers feel tight, or maybe the lightness of a dress brushes the skin differently, and parts of your body feel the particular familiarity or unfamiliarity of something. But that doesn’t make me feel like a man or like a woman. It doesn’t make me feel gendered or placed in a role or a persona at all. I just feel like me. How do you feel?

Now put me in a party. There are the women clustered in one place, and there are the men in another. Where do I head to feel most congruent? Off to join the men and share the latest sport / cars / job news? Or to the women to find out what’s really going on, how they are feeling, what’s going on in their families? Join the first group and I don’t really know what to talk about, unless we turn to a passion like the environment, or poetry. Join the others and I am an outsider; perhaps the conversation changes because a man is present.

A man? What man? I look around and then realise it must be something about me. I have a sense of gender from the inside, everyone else has a perception that is different. My gender is visibly in the wrong kind of body. It isn’t even ambiguous enough, because I got to wear the grey trousers and the striped shirt.

There have been too many days when I have been obliged to present as a man when wanting to write about being female. What happens if someone comes up on Skype, I have the cam on, and Andie, the strongly female friend is sitting there in the wrong trousers, perhaps even unshaven, with man specs? Is that a betrayal of my sense of gender? I judge not, because I am already uncomfortable, not even looking at myself.

What do you feel when you wake up in a morning. OK, certain things can happen to a man that remind him of his gender at that time of day. But aside from that, are we aware? Does it matter? No, so long as we are content with what happens next and get on with the day, doing what we do naturally.

Kate Bornstein is producing a new edition of her Gender Workbook, and has been Tweeting regularly to gain a contemporary view of how people feel about aspects of transgender. Central is the question ‘how do you identify?’. I was not alone in a very assertive, ‘I know what I am not!’ Interesting, because I hear it more and more. I am not a man. I’m quite happy to be called transgender, but do not call me a man! It isn’t that I disown what I have lived as, and I don’t hate men. I just know I do not belong to that tribe.

Which is interesting.

For some time, mainly because it was so easy to do so, I went to the Brighton Buddhist Centre to practice meditation. Mindfulness. Being present, in the moment. Just sitting, being aware of how things are. And in that state of mind, I am aware of a physical state of being a woman. Funny that.

Over a year ago, a friend did some therapy with me in similar vein, and my first comment afterwards, reviewing the inner experience, was that throughout I had visualised myself as a woman in a white dress. I don’t know why. It wasn’t suggested, it wasn’t in the commentary. It wasn’t supposed to be there at all. The only guidance I had was to gain a sense of belonging, and to listen to myself. And there I was.

Now, having just presented myself and my intentions, in the space of a week, to well over 100 musicians, and in public as it were, I had another unexpected experience. My previous blog post covered the matter of whether it was courage or not. No, this was an awareness that somehow, enough people were just recognising what I was saying, and more than just respecting that, were welcoming me as a woman. I am perfectly aware that when I appear for the first time in that last bastion of my male life, many may find it hard to adjust. I will be a novelty, a curiosity, a not-quite-sure and what do I say to – her? But as the pronouns started to be used already, and people were writing my new name, I was so deeply at home with myself, it felt like I had been dragging an anchor and now it held.

Yes, I know what a sense of gender means – though I’m not sure I’m a whole lot better at describing it.

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