To A T

So far I have found that I make much more progress if I concentrate on navigating my own course instead of trying to follow the course of others. This is a really big deal for me.

I stagnated and frustrated and bloviated and demotivated for quite a long time as I watched others sail off into the distance. Finally, I just plain got sick of it.

So now I am doing my own thing, on my very own, not afraid to let go of my dependence on others. Those were some heavy bags I was carrying, let me tell you.

I think the last final measure of whether what I am doing is right and real lies in the results I am getting. And what I am getting is good.

It’s not perfect, though. Surgery does a lot, but it can only do so much.

The comment is a fresh one. So fresh, in fact, that it hadn’t registered on my email when I logged on. I was expecting the first, had read it and approved it away from site, in fact. But the second caught me by surprise. Yes, Nica and I have some history, not all of it positive, but I think we both see now in her what was evident to me a long time ago: that she should make her own way and find comfort and value in that movement. Transition is not an easy movement to make. Nor is it a whim that one easily waltzes her way through. But, for those who are driven by heart, mind and body to do so, regardless of obstacles, transition completes what was misbegotten at birth. It makes whole the broken ragged pieces of a life that’s relentless with dissonance.

No 1812 Overture up-tempo heights and no dashing cavalry charge transferred to music. No cannonades to celebrate victory. In fact, what is victory in transition? I’m not sure I can tell you. I’m not sure anyone can. For victory seems to be registered differently depending on the transitioner.

For some it’s winning a lasting relationship afterwards, for others it’s sexual reassignment surgery (SRS,) or gender confirmation surgery (GCS,) for others its simply finding an ability to live comfortably with ourselves without the dissonant voices and feelings exposing us to emotional thirst and hypothermia like a rejected baby on a Lacedaemonian hillside, subject to the rain and heat, dying in those first few hours after its birth.

No, there’s nothing easy about transitioning whomever you are. Even those who regale one with the ease at which they’ve been accepted and held also have long stories of doubt, fear, longing and the unsettling notion that perhaps they’ve made the wrong choice when they began. It’s only afterwards, after the initial hubbub has settled and they find themselves becoming whole that they cast a backward glance and surmise that “for me this has all been so very easy.” Yep, I remember lots of Basic Training warmly now. Of course that’s with the hindsight and the blurring of thirty-one years.

Quite often we call that growing up, growing older. Who has an easy time growing-up? How many, who aren’t doing it right now, would want to go back and relive every moment of puberty or adolescence, recapitulating every ounce of learning and sorrow that’s often involved with a separation from childhood?

I’d opt out of that. Growing up in an ultra-religious household, the fear and hope of my own body, the fear and hope of just being popular enough, accepted enough, to have a friend, or three, was a tremendously challenging time. All of those hesitant steps to find what one believes, who one believes in, how to handle one’s self. How to make one’s self somehow independent of parents and teachers, friends and neighbors, church-members and political ideology: to form an independent life that is in some unfathomable way unique and respectable?

No, I’d just as soon retain the lessons learned; for growing-up, don’t you know, is not a static one-time process. Rather, one hopes anyway, it’s a vibrant and continuous process that slips along in the same fashion that a sloop slips through the ocean on a breezy day, sails unfurled and hull raising and lowering almost endlessly through the churn and boil of waves. It’s lovely to watch from the shore, although aboard ship it’s perhaps less beautiful to haul a wheel and change a course or to tie off hawsers and rig sails.

Yes, transition is also that way. There’s so much conditioning to examine and retain or release. So much self-consciousness and fear to skim across or wallow through that the sailor can be one very tired and hopelessly despairing human being at the end of the day, at the end of every day.

But, you might think, if you know beyond doubt that you must be who you are, how can you despair?

I presume such a question would arise in the mind of someone who’s never been subject to the process. Although I often suspect that the answer is very close to the surface, even for those who have never attempted a transition. For, how many of us have been told, by those we love, those we sup with, those who work around us at our offices or factories that something we truly wish to do is an impossibility? How many times can and does someone turn their head from you, shaking it, telling you that what you want simply cannot be done?

Thus, today, over coffee, I read the wistful and sorrowful words of Autumn Sandeen at Pam’s House Blend about what appears to be the decision not to go through with what had become a very public transition by the LA Times sport-writer, Mike Penner, who had publically written about his decision to become Christine Daniels, sports-writer. Apparently Christine has stopped revealing herself to the world and Mike will be back to writing his columns.

Well, you might say, there it is. He’s come to his senses and made the only “normal” decision he could make. Or, just maybe, she found that the road to where she wanted to go wasn’t as easy and remarkably trouble-free as she had maybe planned for it to be. Perhaps the strains and stresses of exposure, the pull of family and friends, strangers who had decided that somehow even they had a stake in her decision, was simply too much. Perhaps she realized that she simply wasn’t deeply driven enough, held deeply within the current of providing the soul and heart and mind with a body that conformed to it’s internal and unchangeable make-up that she should withdraw and go another way. That choice, like the earlier one, requires courage and good sense: the same courage and good sense shown in her earlier decision to publically make an attempt to transition.

Transition is a remarkable and overwhelming effort even when one doesn’t announce in their column in a large and respected newspaper that they are beginning to transition from their designated-sex to their heart-sex. Of course one might say as someone blogged about the decision to transition, their decision appearing to be that transition isn’t psychological but simply a body-thang. [The link has been disconnected due to the blogger in question having problems with my understanding of his post and my desire not to engage him in a running he-said, she-said argument.] Because, afterall, his wife doesn’t dress femmie, and if he could safely chose to have another body, one might presuppose that some magical manga/anime transformation from a male-bodied person to a female-bodied person, he might do so. Would it were so easy.

Given the author’s tag cloud he mostly blogs about crossdressing. Perhaps it’s there that the difference becomes clearest. Yes, there is a body-image problem with transsexuality. But, there is also an aspect of mind and spirit involved as well. How to explain to someone who likes to put on a dress occasionally, or every weekend, that the end-result of the transitioner is not to simply correct the body so it’s pleasing to look at. Many of us don’t do that.

Rather there is an amalgamated change that changes the life. Sometimes that transition seems to be accomplished, from the outside, fairly effortlessly. One readjusts his or her hormone mix and the body just more or less does the rest. Of course that requires that bone-structure, build, other aspects of body-formation accomplished by the original hormones-mix haven’t simply made it impossible to “look” like someone of the so-called opposite sex.

Surgeries can change a lot. They can transform a facial appearance to a shape that more or less moves the observer’s mind to “woman” rather than “man.” Breast-augmentation surgeries, as many women are very well aware, can provide enhancement to what nature left one desirous of having. Liposuction can remove fatty tissue from the tummy and transfer it to the hips and bottom. A vocal-chord shortening can help one modulate her voice. (Guys don’t normally require that as the introduction of testosterone lengthens the vocal chords for them.) A “sex-change” operation can basically invert a penis into a vaginal sheath and fasion labia from scrotal tissue. Or a phalloplasty can transform a clitoris and vagina into something more approximate to a penis. Those are things that Nature accomplishes in the womb given a certain preponderance of genetic capacity. Although, as we all know, genetics make a difference, even when Nature does the work.

Yet, why, might we wonder, does someone like Mike Penner or others who have started a long and arduous process decide to return to where they began? I haven’t an answer for that. The decision, I do know, cannot simply be something like “I just always wanted to be a woman.” Nor can it be “Well, men have more power in social interactions.” For such reasons are transitions stopped and reversed.

My experience tells me it is a “soul” thang. The simple desire to have a body of a different shape and a recognition as who, deeply inside, one is has to be accompanied by a steady knowing, a knowing that overrides all of the negative feedback from others, overrides the inherent desire most of us have to not be noticed. It must win out over opposition and those times of deep-struggle when everything seems to be going in the reverse direction one had anticipated things going.

I have watched from afar Nica struggle and see her now finally coming to terms with who she must be. I absolutely cannot imagine that her changes are due to some whim or to a flight of fancy that made her think her body just needed a few tweaks. I cannot and will not write anything that might hurt her here, just allow it to suffice that I have been a witness to some rather turmoil-filled, sorrow-filled, and despair-filled times she has passed through to arrive where she is this morning. To maintain one’s self in the face of that and continue to strive to reach one’s goal is not the result of whim or of simply a desire to modify one’s body.

Instead the process coalesces to a constellation of brilliant stars sliding through an erratic and destruction-risking space to form what appears, today, to be a wonderful arrangement that brings joy to one’s heart and an added beauty to the world. But, the pathway taken to form that constellation braved things that, simply put, would defy the ability of a whim or a simple desire to make a few tweaks in the plumbing to overcome.

That is perhaps the salient and one-true thread that runs through every story of transition I have ever heard, witnessed or had related to me. There is a drive, a willingness, a passion to risk everything based simply on a desire to solve one’s dissonance, to stop the incessant jangle of nerves and emotional noise that plagues one’s very self.

Perhaps that is what Mike Penner realized this time (O, don’t think that Christine is gone forever, she may well not be. That story may not yet be concluded.) The determination to transition is something akin to a climb up Everest. It’s not a whim that one sets about over a weekend and is done with forever. It’s a planned and tested climb through crevices and across glaciers that crack and buckle beneath one’s feet. It’s spending nights in howling storms that batter one with all sorts of unexpected and disheartening winds and furies. It’s not to be undertaken lightly; nor can it be experienced lightly without some regard to anything going on in the world about one’s self.

Job-loss, being looked at askance or being laughed-at by total strangers, harped at by people you’d lay-down your life and limbs for, being harassed by police, rejected by employers and rental agencies “because we don’t want the hassle,” is not a journey that one undertakes and maintains simply on a whim in the face of perhaps a much-easier way. For the fact remains that it’s a whole lot more selfish and safe to simply shrug as do some and say: “Well, I’m a realist and this isn’t for me.” Good choice. It probably isn’t for you; definitely it isn’t for you.

What must be there is the distinct and unrelenting commitment to be one’s self, to haul one’s self up by whatever means necessary and to lose whatever one finds it possible to lose and to still go about the process. No, everyone doesn’t lose everything. Many transitioners have basically kept their entire previous lives intact, except for the ways they are viewed “on the other side.” But, many have indeed lost home, relationships, loves, children, jobs, hopes-for-employment and yes, even their lives in making the transition.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
How many years must some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see? ~ Bob Dylan

No, of course Dylan wasn’t writing in 1963 about a transition from the sex one was designated at birth to the sex one knows she or he is. But, he could have been. I hope that the life of Mike Penner isn’t used by the opponents of those of us who transition successfully, and it’s the overwhelming majority (about 98% to 99%) of the men and women who do so.

Many will very gleefully try to take one person’s experience and make of it a justification that no one should have the ability to make themselves whole. There are those who opt out. Those who do so take the best path for themselves. They are only object lessons for those who feel within a struggle to “be female” or to “be male.” One, very simply put, is or is not one or the other.

Allow their reasons to be their own. My experience tells me that things are probably all to the best that the person has stopped and gone back. Their lives do not “prove” anything about transition except that the road is hard and filled with all sorts of physical, emotional and material obstacles that require much more than a whim to overcome.

In point of fact, it seems to me, that those cautionary tales if they inform of us anything other than the inability of one individual to pursue what they thought was a way toward wholeness for themselves, prove that the determination and struggle, the overwhelming commitment to success by those like Nica, is simply a thing that has to be seen as a lived indication that those who do transition do so for reasons that are deep within themselves and are not a mental illness, are not a fantasy, nor are they an insatiable desire to transform themselves into objects of sexual pleasure or fetishism.

Instead transsexuals are very much aware of and are no longer willing to bear the dissonance of their lives. They are willing to risk everything to settle into wholeness and some form of completion that others cannot settle into in the same way because others do not have the dissonance that demands that they achieve what the person with a transsexed history sets out to achieve: a life of wholeness, a life lived without the blizzard of mental pain that comes from non-acceptance and a lack of peace within one’s self.

I hope with all of my heart that Mike/Christine finds or has found that comfort and peace in their decision to stop transitioning. I hope that having made an attempt to do a thing that requires the knowledge and the unswerving devotion to being her- or himself that they have found that silent cove where one knows, beyond all doubt, this is home, this is where I have always wanted to be.

Whether Mike has or has not is not my determination to make. It’s a personal and deeply singular decision. I simply hope, against hope, that those who would use this trial and seeming error see the point and not the political opportunity to deny the validity and the very real biological fact of transsexuality for those of us who have not de-transitioned, nor ever will.

As two commentors stated in reply to Autumn’s column at House Blend today:

There is a lot that happens when transitioning, sometimes the dream is more than expected.  Sometimes the dream is less.

But, to not try to reach for a dream is to not know what it really is.

And,

As a person who did RLT for over a year and then re-transitioned, I truly understand the difficulty of this decision. There were many factors that informed my path, including my need to make a living and safety. I didn’t return to male, although that’s what it looked like to the outside. I now identify as neither gender, androgyne, that’s what works for me. I continue to work for the day in which a person doesn’t have to be one or the other, that it will be possible to live anywhere on the continuum that feels right for each of us. I wish Mike/Christine all the best in her journey.

The peace and comfort at process’ end can be the only measurement that’s valid. For the human heart crafts its songs and its sorrows in the deepest caverns in this world, those that lie within itself.

Shanti.