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Come on in, but not for an explanation

  • Posted on May 3, 2015 at 4:20 pm

Society is very dysfunctional at times. Some of those times are when things change. Which is all the time. Nothing is as dysfunctional as when one group doesn’t understand another group and doesn’t want to. That’s where wars start, families break down, cities dissolve into riot, and discrimination breeds hatred. But let’s look on the bright side instead.

What happens when a status quo challenges the prevailing view and people do want to understand?

I was challenged last summer over social issues, which in the end boiled down to the argument that if A and B are different, it isn’t up to B to educate A in order to gain acceptance or equality. Rather, it is up to A to gain an understanding such that equality is simply no longer at issue. The principle seems to be that if A has privilege (i.e. they never need to explain being different from B), then as privileged people they should be the ones to make the effort, challenge their own privilege. Why should B need to defend and explain anything? After all, both A and B are equally different …. The problem is the privilege, not the difference.

So far this seems quite reasonable, fair and logical. And yet at the time this was presented to me, it seemed equally reasonable that I should be able to have dialogue with B in order to understand why I was seen as having this ‘privilege’ of simply being (by accident) me-where-I-am. And dialogue was being refused on grounds of ‘it’s not up to me to educate you’. How else was I to gain insights, since everything else short of dialogue was going to only provide an outsider view of the difference between me (A) and B? I think I came to an impasse over this in the end.

My social range is changing (as is that of my partner!) and what this implies is that each of us is going to meet new people. Some will be surprised – by our differences: our age difference, that we are in a lesbian relationship, that I have a trans history, meaning (for them) I ‘used to be a man’. And that sort of screws up the lesbian thing a bit and, if they’ve never met a transsexual person before, make them wonder quite what I am altogether.

This places us both in a situation where explanations may be wanted. My big thing is that we don’t owe anyone an explanation about anything. Why are we in a happy relationship, living together, making a new home life? Well, it’s easy. We love each other, we feel we are good for each other, and it all feels to us the most natural and normal thing to be doing. So what should be more requiring of explanation than love, well-being and happiness? I guess some will nonetheless find us hard to understand straight away, whilst more than expected simply wish us well and be happy for us. Explanations will always be around the corner, and we can either offer them or ignore them.

So what are explanations about?

I think that what I might need to explain is why the other person feels uncomfortable or uncertain about ‘how to treat me’. In other words, I can describe the condition of being transsexual, and (as in this blog as a whole) describe my experience of discovering myself and going through a transition – but that is not an explanation. I can offer theories to date of how a person can have a gender that is not in agreement with their physiological sex characteristics, and this will offer an explanation of how I came to be transsexual at birth. But it doesn’t explain anything. What seems to be requiring an explanation is why my ‘condition’ (now fixed) is an issue, why it brings people up short, why it presents any confusion in them, and why it concerns them at all by feeling I must be ‘different’ in any way that matters. Maybe I am unpredictable, mentally unwell, weird, dare I say it, perverted, you know, sexually? Because they don’t know.

In other words, I am explaining not myself, but them. Why is this my job? Try this:

I saw someone today, and I couldn’t decide if they were a man or a woman. Then I saw them kissing another woman, and I thought, ‘I wonder what she must be thinking and feeling with someone so unusual and odd’. I couldn’t stop thinking about them all afternoon, so I talked to some colleagues, and they thought it was funny. I didn’t want to laugh, so I felt awkward joining in. I wondered, if someone like that came into my shop and asked to try on a dress, how it would make me feel. I couldn’t decide how I would address them, and thought how embarrassing it could be. Then I realised I might be more embarrassed than they, and wondered why I was thinking about it so much. Why was I feeling so uncomfortable? It’s a bit like not knowing when to help someone in a wheelchair, or where to look if someone has a disability. My friend used to say ‘look at the person, not the disability’, but I don’t think the person I saw today was disabled. Just odd.

Where is the best explanation needed? The explanation the observed person might give is simply: ‘Oh; I’m trans. I guess you noticed.’ The real explanation of the situation is more like: ‘Transsexual people make up a percentage of the population. Some you notice, some you don’t. If you’re really not sure what pronouns to use, just ask. But if you feel uncomfortable, it’s time you did a bit of simple research on gender, because your discomfort arises from a basic misunderstanding. This person you saw doesn’t share your misunderstanding, so if you want to feel better about it, sort out your own discomfort.’

It doesn’t need my life story to provide an explanation, because it doesn’t do that. The story is just how I came to understand, and what I did about it. I can always offer that for anyone who needs to know, because (as previous blogs recently) it’s come to be an ordinary fact of life. It helps people in similar situations, but it explains nothing to the uncomfortable. I remember people who said to me years ago: ‘I’m not ready to meet you yet’ (they never did), and realise that no explanation of this kind would help them anyway. I can give the facts, but the explanation of why people need to ask is, in most cases, up to them.

And so it is that I came to the conclusion that there is no more ‘coming out’ to do. That was an event that enabled me to inform people, not explain. What happens now is ‘coming in’, where anyone who wants to be part of my life is welcome to understand why they might not want to, drop this, and join me. In all our entirely shared and equal differences.

This can probably be generalised quite usefully. First find out if people socially different to you really are potentially harmful (not just conflicting with your beliefs), or not. If not, they are just different from you (and equally, you from them). They might be as uncertain about you and think you harmful. If we are all open to learn about others (and change our beliefs and prejudices accordingly), then in turn we become open to let others in. Then the whole of society has a better chance of being less dysfunctional.

I’m not coming out, but you are welcome to come in.

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Negative thoughts: what’s in a memory?

  • Posted on April 11, 2015 at 1:23 pm

When cameras shot rolls of film in 24s and 36s, you got envelopes back, with the developed film in cut strips. These (if you were like me) you filed, along with the rubbish prints that never made it to an album. Filed? Well, probably stacked in a box and never looked at again. I did the filing in case I wanted to enlarge or reprint from a negative strip. On a few rare occasions I did. A few. And so it is that I now have a heavy box on my sofa, regurgitating these envelopes, and retrieving a few photos of my children. These are the easy ones. If the birthday cake says ‘7’ on it, then I can tell when it was taken. But the steam train? The castle? The rainbow?

This is a heavy task, and you can well ask why I am doing it. The boxes aren’t so big that they couldn’t find yet another stuff-away place, it’s just that this time I know I shall never squint at the negative strips and make decisions about reprinting. It’s a heavy task, because those plastic strips represent my life, and split it in two. I can’t share the task either. My ex has the family print albums, and at some point I want to borrow them to take digital page-snapshots. But I don’t think just yet. Not now.

Albums wake up memories, and are best shared. (Where was that? Do you remember that house / holiday / event / thing we did?) Suddenly I don’t have anyone I can ask or refer to, let alone enjoy the memory with. Yes, I remember, and from behind these eyes, I think that’s OK. From the packs I’ve already been through, and the few discarded print retrievals, I have had a rich life. What I can’t handle so well are the prints (few) in which I have been captured. Here is a person, a young person (well, younger) who clearly loves their family, their spouse and kids, doing, making, sharing, giving, playing. They look like they were loved, enjoyed and valued too. It was fun.

Wasn’t it?

But who the fuck is young beardy with my family …? What right has he to be in my place? I feel angry, because he looks familiar but I don’t know him. He has stolen my family away. The birthday cakes, the holidays, the Christmases, the homes, gardens, pets. The belonging. The love.

He. Has stolen. My life.

I understand what you are thinking: that they feel I have stolen this person away, and that it’s my fault, and that’s why I no longer have any link to this pile of photographic records. But that isn’t how it feels to me. The problem is young beardy there, because I know he is smiling to the camera and enjoying life, while all the time I know exactly what he is thinking, feeling, doing – when alone. He is hiding, running, scared and not telling. Of course he can’t, can he? Because if he speaks his mind, heart or fears, all these pictures will stop. Bending parents over small children, crouched over books and toys, will stand up, shocked and horrified. Toddlers in the bath will stop giggling. The music will stop, the game will be over, the smiles will fall. So he didn’t.

And so it’s his fault now, that I have a carrier bag of paper wallets and scrap prints, and another of plastic sprocketed strips, on the floor, and half a box on my sofa, and honest confusion in my head. Am I throwing anything away? Untouched negatives, unwanted prints, space takers and careless memory-joggers. And there is nothing I can do about it. I am simply reminded that I never was going to do anything with the negatives when I said ‘you take the albums’, as I walked away from the ruins of the last family home. And that the memories in your head only really mean all they should, when the same memories are in the head of another with whom you can share them with knowing, prompted by these images.

The little boy? He seemed a lot happier when little. He’s had a less easy life than I would ever have wished for him, and now he has sole responsibility for his adult life. I helped launch him into life’s orbit, but he’s up there on his own now, communicating sporadically, and I can do little more as a parent. And anyway, how can it be as the same parent now?

The little girl laughs a lot, and plays with her brother. She really is very cute. And she would hate me even more for saying that. She has grown into an attractive woman, and I imagine that she would never want to see a photo with her and young beardy together, ever again. Well, not if she thinks that parent is still alive and thinking of her. I imagine that it’s more comfortable to put him among the dead ancestors. Either way it’s his fault that we aren’t able to communicate any more. Yes, I helped launch her into orbit too, but like a malfunctioning remote lander, or a satellite without working antennae, she is real and out there but with a location and activity quite unknown to me. If I had been there instead of young beardy, I would still have a daughter.

The mother. The mother is still an attractive woman, still kind, sociable and generous. You can tell she loved young beardy, and I guess he took all the pictures with equal sentiment. Yes, they look good together. Equal. Devoted. Happy. But where was I?

I feel angry. Where am I in these pictures? Why are they mine? Why is this family not mine? Why was it taken away from me? Why can I not remember together any more? Why are my memories in free and disconnected orbit? Why was young beardy the favoured one, the loved parent, the spouse, the partner, the beloved? Why not me? I am left thinking that he is the betrayer, the liar, not me sitting here with the remnants. And yet everyone else would say that I am.

And this is the problem. The little boy is the young man in orbit. The little girl is the soon-to-be married woman, in orbit. The wife, the mother, the attractive divorcee, the successful sociable woman – she too is still fully connected to her past, her family, and together they circle the life they have always had together, the cloud of memories. Every negative makes sense to them, every print is connected to retrievable memories, the memories are shared and bring joy. Young beardy though; he simply does not belong in the picture. He is no longer in orbit, and has been completely ex-communicated from this world of memories. Something is out there, but not recognisably him, not with any means of tuning in.

I have inherited the memories, as if digitised in a back-up drive, but I am not him. Young beardy was a fearful liar, and has gone. And having gone digital, the hyperlinks on all my memory files can be read, but connect to no-one else. I click on the birthday cake. I click in the sand-pit. I click on the old house, the red tractor with the little boy, the trampoline and the girl, the beautiful wife and none of the links works. I just have the picture of each, on its own.

What is a memory when it is unshared?

You know what really hurts the most? Where the grief really lies? It is that I was there. Either in the picture or behind the camera. And in my life I have had an enormous amount of happiness, love and reward. Not one of these pictures reminds me of conflict, or argument, not even disagreement. There is no distrust, aversion or hate, and in not one is there the remotest hint of something hidden. I was – we were – truly happy as people together, and yet it always did hang on one small thing: that how I felt inside had to be kept inside. Love and happiness depended entirely on me playing young beardy, every day.

What the pictures never show is how I felt on my own. They never show what I had to hide. They never showed the pain or fear, anger, hate or frustration. Because I loved my family too much to lose them, for as long as I could. Predictably, that love all evaporated as soon as my authentic self began to tear the fabric of my outer, not-so-young, no-longer-beardy self, completely apart, top to bottom.

But I loved. I truly, deeply loved. And that is why every memory is happiness and hurts, and can no longer be shared with anyone.

There is a small stack of prints left, mainly relating the early years of marriage and early childhood of my two children. And with these are a few more, of one or two people I loved a long time ago, and a few of these remind me of another girl, and the happiest time of my younger life. I feel comforted, because I know that I love; that I go on loving, however difficult life gets, and with love comes that insistent drive of life, of growing, of being. Of becoming.

I am about to take the bags down to the bins in the yard. There is a sense of loss, even if I was never going to refer to the thousands of negatives ever again. What is in a memory, when it is not shared? For me, the capacity to live and to love; the self-assurance that I can do nothing else. Pictures may remind me of loss, but without the negative thoughts, what is printed in my memory is still gratitude that I have shared in a lot of real happiness through love.

My partner and I have a list stuck to the fridge, of things we want to do. At the bottom is says ‘photography day out’.

There will be no negatives this time.

 

See also (poetry):

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Dementia

  • Posted on April 3, 2015 at 11:33 am

You said ‘bitch’ which I have not heard
you accuse before, like that. It is an unkindness
wedged amongst broken exposed neurons.

It is an insult without interpretation, a word
that robs our sense of kin-ness, confuses
kind in deconstruction with cruel revelation.

Where was ‘bitch’ before entering your mouth as
utter contempt for your consideration? Betrayal
of layers—or delamination of mind?

Somewhere between memory and repetition,
intent and imagination, lies the confluence
of meaning and demeaning in grey shadows.

This is the catch, as time tears your fabric,
like a wind reducing buildings to their bones in
an empty street, and wandering, a lone canine stray.

 

2015 © Andie Davidson

 

This poem was provoked by the experience of my mother, slipping from all we knew into degrees of dementia. Mainly at present it is forgetfulness, but in this, a forgetting of context, and of trust, in her own capacity and of others. There must be an awareness that all is not as it was. When reminded of things quickly forgotten or misplaced, in moments of greater clarity, a dawning, just as dawnings themselves become misty experiences, that mind is slipping, and with it the crafted character. How much of personality is soul, and how much a fabricated façade? Not to be false, but even to be what we want to be. Can memories of others’ patterns of behaviour and speech be as falling beams in a collapsing house? That fall into places previously occupied by our own character? Or does the fabric collapse just expose our more basic instinctive responses? I don’t know. The poem merely expresses this doubt and the sadness of it. Again, my written style is to use many ambiguous words, allusion and internal cross-reference to create layers of meaning from rereading the poem several times.

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Role swapping

  • Posted on March 18, 2015 at 10:00 pm

I guess it’s really funny. The years I spent described (not by me) as being ‘in role’, as if ‘living as a woman’ was an act, a choice, a play or a deceit … and now, here I am examining – my ‘role’!

Yes, the point is that in terms of my working life, I took a big step down, and now, long since the fear that I would be forever unemployable as trans* was proven wrong, I am feeling very under-employed. I feel a certain sexism that is not quite discrimination, but is nevertheless there at times, and part of me is screaming to be recognised for just how much I am capable of without having to fight for it.

My guess is that many women in work after family events breaking their careers, feel much the same.

But what is more in mind is how, over the past few months, living with a professional partner in a vastly more responsible job than I may ever see again, I am experiencing reversed roles. Not that I am complaining; it is genuinely interesting to see both sides, as I recall the hours I used to work, coming home late, and sometimes taking work with me on holiday. Nowadays, I am more likely to be first home from work, will set to making a meal, will accommodate late hours, the bringing home of office troubles and stress, looking after the home(s), and generally take a back seat when it comes to the pressures of work in life versus domestic pleasures. Don’t get me wrong, we do share things out very well – far better perhaps than I did when I was married – but I am recognising a bit of what it is to be the domestic wife supporting the (lesbian) husband!

Tonight I am starting this blog to fill in time while my partner works late to finish a report to a deadline. We hope to leave at 10:00 pm for our first weekend away, and employer demands have pushed us into second place. I can’t be angry, other than at situations intruding into precious personal life. I would have done the same. But I now see and understand what I was doing when I was the husband with the more important job, expecting everyone to fit around me. Once again, as a trans woman, I am seeing both sides of life: the privilege, the seniority, the primacy, the supporting act, the home-maker, the forgiver. This isn’t about rights and wrongs, but I am being faced with the feelings that I must have evoked when my job was so important (at least to me) that my wife simply had to sit and watch and wait until I was present and ready. (I’m not making an argument about employer pressure, our response, rights or wrongs; this happens, and we all try to do the best all-round thing at the time.)

I still do think it a privilege to live on both sides of life, see it as man and as woman, as husband and as wife, as lead earner, and as sideline. Quite what to do with this knowledge beyond personal enrichment, I’m not sure, but it is giving me plenty to reflect on, as to how our society’s patterns of working conflict with making the most or personhood and finding a ‘good life’.

 

Well, we did get away and had a wonderful weekend. We celebrated the ease with which, in this part of southern England, we could be ourselves, the clearly lesbian couple away for a weekend together. We spoke to kind strangers in the sauna as well as out walking, sat and people-watched over lunch, held hands everywhere and enjoyed the ease we have with each other.

Three months into our relationship, I still feel some surprise to be loved, but with it, day by day feel more completely in my gender. Friends did tell me before I had surgery that the onward journey had a great deal more change in it than I was expecting. Now I understand. The scars that healed many months ago are completely forgotten. The scars still healing are those from a lifetime of discomforts, and events and expectations joined to them. They don’t hurt the same, but as they fade into the life and love I am able to experience now, I am realising just how much I needed this complete transition.

And part of that is the understanding of role, the appreciation of gendered worlds, the very difficult male-minded design of work and commerce, the lesser value attached to person-oriented activities, the simply being female in society. I am very thankful to have known both sides and have gained a better appreciation of what it is to be human in the here and now, and I am happy to be wife and support, and possibly because I know that I also have an empowerment to be fully myself.

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Idol thoughts

  • Posted on March 7, 2015 at 10:40 pm

This week, bulldozers were running over 3,000 year-old treasured remains of the ancient city of Nimrud. I remember it from my university studies and visits to the British Museum, as containing very powerful symbols of a civilisation that dominated the region that is now Iraq. I always found it quite absorbing imagining the people who actually made the statues, built the temples, walls and gates, used the artifacts in their daily lives but also in their rituals. 3,000 years in one way is relatively recent, but in another is really ancient. The same artifacts that I could recall, then appeared this week being pounded under sledgehammers by men from the so-called Islamic State or ISIL.

It isn’t new though. Throughout history, histories have been obliterated, and religious extremists of all kinds have destroyed things precious in our eyes for secular reasons. In the Reformation in England, iconoclasm, or the removal of religious symbolism, was every bit as destructive. In 2001 the Taliban destroyed the 1,700 year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan because they were considered idols. In Nimrud, the destruction was again because significance was perceived to exist in objects we might just see as art. The same has now happened in Hatra. So what is an idol, that deserves such treatment?

We don’t have them much around here – do we?

An idol, even in biblical times, was an object invested with power. It doesn’t mean that the stone or wood, once chiselled and shaped, actually had any power, only that it was believed to have such, and therefore influenced people’s behaviours in relation to it. At the extremes, of course, such objects can become fetishes, and through suggestion are seen as being very powerful supernatural objects. Believe in the magic, or power, juju or voodoo, and real things do happen; charms, enchantments and curses really can affect people. But if you or I were innocently to find such an object, it would just be at most a sinister-looking piece of handcraft.

It is peculiar how as humans in societies, we create these things out of nothing, and then fear them, curse and bless with them, and render them dangerous enough to destroy again. And it’s all in the human mind. Religion, in this sense, still intrigues me. How is it that we can construct the edifices of a very wide variety of supernatural and superstitious beliefs, which necessarily must be limited by contemporary awareness and understanding and context, and then invest them with such infallibility that they become immutable doctrines, dogmas, rules, beliefs and faiths?
Essential to this activity is that the ‘knowledge’ has come from beyond, not from within, despite all evidence to the contrary.

That every divine being elucidated in literature has chosen to communicate with mankind through chosen individuals and mysterious beings, ending up being written down and susceptible to mistranslation and misunderstanding, may seem suspicious. (Is there really no better or more certain and secure way?) Even more so when this divine knowledge is expressed in temporally-bound terms. And yet here we are, in a world flooded with religions purporting to free us, whilst drowning us in guilt, self-destruction, rigid principles, and immune to improving knowledge and understanding. Copernicus and Galileo are stark reminders, but have we really moved on?

I had a slightly testy conversation recently over social media, that had been evoked by religious influence in a legal case. A judge had expressed his opinion about same-sex parenting, in court, and had been reprimanded, and a petition had been raised by Christian people to reinstate him. I objected to personal faith in a courtroom, but also to the underlying assumption that I was now unworthy of being a parent simply by virtue of being transsexual and also lesbian. Love, it seems, is not the same thing in a family with me as parent, as it would previously have been. Out trotted the usual mantra: ‘God made man and woman and marriage for the procreation and stable upbringing of children and this is the only natural way.’

Well, I went back with them over the definitions and current state of scientific understanding of the origins and meaning of sex and sexuality, explaining that you can either believe the man/woman binary system in the face of all evidence to the contrary, or you can see that in fact it isn’t quite as simplistic as that at all. And if the man/woman binary thing is unsafe, and you stop believing in it in the face of the facts, where does that leave you with concepts of marriage and parenting, families and households? The trouble with religions is that you can’t let them out of the bottle. So am I unfairly hitting back at religion, because it is so prevalent in the misunderstanding and bigotry against LGBTQI people? I began with a religious situation destroying the secular, in the belief that it was not secular but idolatrous. And now I am saying that religions easily make their own beliefs iconic and protected from secular understanding. Is it just that religion of any kind gets into a muddle, because it is not based on knowledge, and an understanding what knowledge actually is?

Having ranted and explained, I then came across a vlogger patiently going through some very interesting material on how presupposition affects perception (example: generally, we think male babies are bigger and stronger than female babies, not because of what we observe, but simply because we have been told a particular baby is male or female.) There are many researched examples that demonstrate our perception is skewed easily. Interview a person with your hands round a warm drink, and you will feel better towards them than if you hold a cold drink. Yes, that basic. So if you have a set of strongly-held beliefs or opinions, of course the world is a different place, and you actually think things are different. You have a faith? Then in your hands it has a supernatural power and changes the way the world is, around you. Even if you have an iconoclastic faith, your faith itself is an icon.

But this vlogger was even more interesting, because she vlogs as an atheist, experiencing atheist transphobia (a small percentage of transphobes whose attitudes cannot be attributed to religious cultural conditioning). Her conclusion was that the atheism itself had become a faith, and that the problem of the transphobes is that they have closed their understanding to new knowledge, to learning, and new ways of looking at things.

It all makes you wonder what ‘faith’ is. Is it just the ability to think without thinking about thinking?

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