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The Marketplace For Lonely Individuals

March 21, 2011

Yesterday [Fri, March 4th] I decided to write a friend. She’s someone I have had web discussions, email discussions, and bulletin board discussions with for years. I’ve seen pictures of her and she of me, but we have never met in person. I’ve never heard her voice, but I know a few things about her. Some she’s told me. Others I know from parsing her sentences and paragraphs. Still others she and I know about one another for we share a certain similarity of experience and body morphology.

She replied sometime before morning when I read her email. She asked a few questions, among them “how’s work?” Work is forever one of those things. It’s a kind of Somerset Maugham situation, “sharp like the razor’s edge.” Daily it seems Kama teaches Nachiketa something new of life and what’s important. When one’s work is to work with mentally ill people in an inner city, there’s always that aspect of walking the razor’s edge involved.

Much of the work is the same as the work I might do with a suburbanite, or with a spoiled brat who I was seeing in my role as a therapist. I simply find ways to have that other speak their life and thoughts to me, trying the while to reflect back to them the story they are telling and so have them hear and see that story themselves. In that regard, the task is always quick to slide to ruin if one doesn’t gauge the audience correctly, cannot find the vibrational frequency of the other and tune to it.

Research shows,  it’s been done and done, and done, more times than you can shake a stick at the dog barking all day in your yard, over the past thirty years. It always shows that regardless of modality, technique, or orientation the single most salient indicator of a successful therapeutic encounter is the relational connection between patient and therapist.

If she doesn’t resonate with you on your wavelength it won’t matter if she’s been voted the premier practitioner in the world and uses the newest therapy orientation devised. Her therapy will fail with you. Game, set, match.

That’s a difficult thing to accept for many therapists. The young ones, the very new ones, very often have difficulties in placing their notions of right and wrong, acceptable behavior, social class, skin tone, religious belief, etc off to the side as being of no importance to the encounter. They struggle to present, better be,  a self that’s able to find the vibrational frequency of the patient. What’s almost always lost, and I suspect some of the loss comes from what the prospect learns in graduate school and in undergraduate school before that, is that what’s important is not what I think, not what I’ve been taught, but how well I can connect with my patient.

The fact of the matter is:  empathy is not simply the ability to relate the things in the patient’s life to my own.

Although, I have to admit that if a patient has grown up in the ‘burbs, has a liking for psychological fiction and deft writing, feels the pull of nature and growing a garden, is a practicing lesbian and not an intellectual one, has a fondness for winnowing her belief through multiple sieves from multiple spiritual traditions and comes to find Mother at the center of it all … well, I have to admit that the empathy will likely be easier to come by. Of course just working with myself would make that even easier, wouldn’t it?

One shouldn’t work with herself. Explore herself, analyze herself, learn to know herself and her psyche, of course she should do that. But perform psychotherapy with herself? Naw, not so much. That means that she must work to develop empathy. To do so, she has to be able to place herself in the unfamiliar position (in middle class and upper class America) of feeling what others feel, and imagine their lives in the context of where those lives take place. She must open herself to the unfamiliar, the odd and strange and then manage to match the things she finds in the world she works in with those she finds in her internal world.

Therapists should be explorers. The country we should initially and always primarily explore is the country of ourselves. In that realm we are able to use counter-transference as the tool it embodies than as the thing we fear most. In that realm we can discover just how far removed we may be from the people we work with; begin to understand why technique will never be as crucial to the therapeutic process as relationship will be.

Therein, I’ve found is where many recently, or anciently, or mediumly long ago degreed therapists and many university-oriented and employed in classrooms therapists lose our way.

We imagine that we should work with a different clientele; those more like us. When faced with people unlike us, many of us find ourselves wanting to teach classes that in some way point out the ignorance and reasons for change that our clients on the other side of the tracks do not necessarily find persuasive.

Just stop and consider for a moment. When people are still struggling to get for themselves basic modicums of health and safety they may be less than interested in how to maximize their potential through meditation and enacting the precepts involved in the Law of Attraction. Food, clothing, shelter and release of primal lust may be of more import to people not raised as a part of the American middle and upper  classes. Face it, most therapists grew to adulthood  in the American middle class and many grew up in more exalted class categories.

Yet, one of the needs that human beings have above most others is the need to be a part of something larger, to be a part of a village, a family, a clan. Although currently ueber-individualistic dominant schools of American thought find such thinking naĂŻve and jejune one still finds that belonging to a definable and close group is among the most satisfying of human endeavors.

Our quests for life on other planets, for exploring lands we haven’t been to before, or searches for the parents we were bereft of while growing up are all part and parcel of that deep longing: to be part of something larger than me.

Perhaps one of the enduring strengths of the Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and other such recovery organizations is their ongoing ability to place importance within a community of people. There, if I struggle with drinking uncontrollably or an addiction to street and other drugs (wonder if that paragon of individualism, Rush Limbaugh, has found the companionship of fellow addicts helpful in his ongoing struggles with drug addictions?) I am able to not move beyond the social pale.

One wonders, in fact, if the addictions to piling up wealth and gelt to the exclusion of anything like a recognizable urge to be a social human being isn’t a means of deflecting the loneliness at the core of men like David and Charles Koch, Jamie Dimon, Dick Fuld, Sir Fred Goodwin and other assorted villains and noxious trolls in our national and international spotlights.Did Imelda Marcos collect shoes due to some unresolved psychic issues of not-belonging? Perhaps it’s best not to closely psycho-analyze the departed, or the very distant, but it does kinda make ya wonder, no?

Our national sociocultural mythos that places the all-conquering and totally independent person in the hero’s seat continues to beg the single most damning question of the entire enterprise. Who gave birth to you? And the second most damning question: who cared for you until you could function “by yourself?” And finally the question that none of those self-made, strong just because I am men and women never really want answered: who and what provides your sustenance now, seeing that you cannot grow a damned thing except a stock account? Who grows your food, pares your nails, makes your cologne, weaves the fabric of your suits, coifs your hair, builds your limousine, built your home and made the materials for building. Most of all, who brings the gasoline to the tank for your limousine?

Self-made my pa-toot. Unequivocally dependent all the time, just as are we all. Yet, in our age we contrive to forget that. We draw to and around ourselves the myths that we are somehow Achilles without the heel, Prometheus without the chaining to the mountaintop. Our world, our social milieu weaves the illusions of self-sufficiency and independence around us all.

To be so decidedly alone that we need no other, is to finally come to the place where we cannot think of the other without perceiving her as a commodity, an instrument, a cypher to be used for a purpose and placed aside unless and until a similar purpose arises. We decline, nay, completely discount, relationship and the everyday importance of friendship, the health embodied in connection and mutual reliance.

Is it a wonder involved that therapies do not work? Is there a mystery in our killing ourselves and despairing amid the riches our fathers and ourselves heaped at our feet? Is it a wonder that in the midst of thousands of people we walk among daily many of us feel so lonely and alone that we use internet social networks  as though they were personal interfaces with living breathing and touchable human beings. Yet, simultaneously we fear to  touch, hear the breathes, and watch the lives of embodied people unfold and touch our own?

There’s no mystery, no conundrum. There ‘s studied isolation. There’s studied dis-ease. There are a myriad cries that go unheard every day, the cries that call for companionship, for the sound of another voice in the bowels of the machine. The cries of our psyches pleading for our mercy.

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Categories: A Life, Connection, Mental Health, Psyche, Psychology, Therapy, Trauma
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My Tears Fall Like Rivulets Over Stalactites In Cavern Dark, Drip To The Floor, Make A Pool To House Jewel-Glow Eyeless Fish That Lend Light To My Eyes, Keep Me From Blindness

January 30, 2011

Pain. Yes.

What does she know of pain? What does he know? What do we know of one another’s pain and how well can we resonate with another’s feelings and scars?

The trick, don’t you see, and likely you do not, is to draw the pain of another into one’s self for the purpose of learning this: that pain, universally and without fail, is exchangeable. There is no pain-type that will cause the nerves of the receiver to coagulate should she experience in her mind and heart the pain of another who is type x instead of type w.

Or, perhaps the pain is simply an experience of imagination where she believes that her own brain resonates with the brain of the woman telling the story of her rape and how for a few days she lay naked and afraid in the dining room of her home in her own blood while he held a gun to her head or in her sex until, at last, her sister and sister’s husband came by, found her, called the police, who came and left with the perpetrator.

But, you see, he lingers yet a while. He loiters in her brain, her body, her soul. He makes a place there as though soul, body, and brain were his own. He takes residence where he was never invited to enter. She went to answer the doorbell and then the deluge.

To come to an understanding of another’s pain may be far beyond the boundaries drawn by even those who seek to heal. There often resides no resonance within their hearts. Psyche hasn’t yet dropped the wax on Eros arm and realized, in the moment of the burn, that he sees that she sees … him.

Techne, not Psyche, might be the veiled lover of Eros. In my field, we have made a wasteland and have come to call it treatment, healing.

The plain truth is this: you either own the ability or you don’t. The ability is the ability to resonate with another human being. You can either disown your own life and prejudices, expectations, privilege, history to the extent that you can feel the vibrations of the other as your own. Or you can not.

Simple. Or not.

Some have become adept at technique. In our world and time we often mistake technique for an answer to the problem. We often mistake technique for healing.

An Aspergerian may have a unique ability to quote at length from the tomes of learned professors, make lists of credentialed studies proving beyond doubt that depth psychology has no place in the mechanical world of behaviorist modifications.

She might show that a symbol means nothing; that the very idea of feeling and empathy is a sad human construct left over from pre-mechanistic universe days. She may declare that empathy is not science. There’s more here than your philosophy has dreamt of, Horatia.

Begging the question, how much science does she know? The history of, for instance, Kepler’s music like relaxation balls rolled in the palm of a hand? What of Newton’s alchemical wedding of matter and energy; the unseen force that brings us all to ground and affords the proper amount of weight to our every discussion. Gravitas. Indeed.

Ah, but the intuition cannot be measured. It can be difficult to control, or difficult when uncontrolled. Intuitive work requires way more experience than a third year graduate student is likely willing to spend, or could spend, to learn the way it flows. Of course, much easier to learn within that three year window is the quintessentially American quick-fix and “get ‘er back on the road” operating standard that is CBT.

Not that that’s a flaw, just that the short-term has much better results than does the long term. The taught patient retains the learning for a limited amount of time. Automatic thoughts and illogical personal schemas need much work to replace with more effective habits. The absences of the therapeutic connection appear to also breakdown the long-term effects of the learning.

Perhaps trying to learn manipulative techniques is a way to proceed. I suggest wariness of how one uses the knowledge developed by psychologists might also be a thing to look toward. Faust had ability, no doubt, the purposes to which one sets his ability matters more than the fact of his ability.

That, you see, is where we increasingly go wrong in our cultural imperatives. It’s not a matter of “falling away” from the old-time religion. The fact of the matter is that the majority of us have done away in our hearts and lives with any sort of morality at all. We recall the word, but not it’s substance. Another knock-on effect of capitalism.

We replace moral pondering and difficult formulation with easy rules that establish control and support it with an iron fist.

We maximize profit and minimize the importance of relationship. I suspect that there’s a direct connection in our doing so and the amount of guilt we feel when we do. The intuitive understanding will tend toward the importance of personal connection over the importance of mercenary gain.

Culturally we have grown distant from that notion, now we tend toward greed and self-aggrandizement over all else. Should we be surprised that the center doesn’t hold? Discount the value of relationships among people as being the bringers of good health. Instead make relationship a paying proposition, not the key to a human context, a human sociability that’s inborn for each of us (unless it is co-opted early in life by cruelty and abuse, designed withdrawal of affection and nurture.) Do that and one minimally discounts any importance of human scale and value.

Believe, instead in the efficacy of science and materiality: the value of genetically engineered and patented grains, animals, crops, fruits, vegetables. Pour fertilizer unendingly into soil that once, when people understood the earth as more than “just dirt,” could fashion its own fertility year after year with animal waste, vegetal decay, nitrogen fixation and husbandry in cycles as old and hallowed and as unpatentable as the breath in your lungs.

Believe that the piling up of capital and the shrewd investment of same will float all boats, solve all ills, leave our children with a 300% increase in ADHD, a 400% increase in food allergies and asthma, and a 1500% increase in autism over the past twenty years while we have fed same children a steadily growing diet of artificial food made with a hearty helping of petro-carbons to the profit of Duponts, Monsantos, 3Ms, ConAgras, all sorts of financial players, and various oil giants, automobile manufacturers and hundreds of political harlots who lie down for love of cash itself.

Any vestige of human compassion and thought, of struggling with the “what should I dos” and “how do I feels” has been trashed. Someone, whose moral compass compares favorably to toy compasses, will or has been more than happy to collect $25 from each of us and then hold forth with his (almost always a male, females occasionally develop some power, but most often they get it through the age-old custom of getting it through marriage) religious notion of what’s wrong and how to make it right.

Among the critters of the end times where is there room for compassion? What daughter of Mother can practice empathy and have that understood as a “best practice?” In the flux and flummox of imperial collapse where have the heart and the soul been hidden? As our Titanic halts and tilts, breaks in half, we’ve become savages, and glory in that.

The healing professions, most especially that part concerned with heart and soul health, have become the scene of brokered deals and races to the bottom in treatment options.

That’s our morality, a morality of declining imperial reach. Doesn’t a healer owe more than that to herself, to those with whom she tries to effect healing?

My souls find her seat. I sit and write in a faint glow, bunkered against the surges and tidal ebbs and flows of the end times. (Please, stop thinking Armageddon when it’s only the end of the imperium as known in America.)

Deep within it’s own dark, silent cave my soul waits. She resides where eyeless fish glow in the dark of a pool that’s formed from tears I’ve been weeping, tears that have slid down my cheeks, across the smooth marbleized silk skin of my arms. They’ve drained into a depression in the rock on the floor. They’ve made a pool for glowing, eyeless fish to migrate through dark currents and bring me light in this cavern wherein I have hidden myself. The glow fends away blindness.

I consider the cave, a large, warm, cliff-ledged affair on some land where I can find herbs and plants to mix potions. A place where fire can warm and one can dress in skins and worked flax if she must.  It seems to me that sanity, the heart and soul, are always more important and more to be valued than the workings of any machine.

Blessed be!

Cross posted at The Spectrum Cafe.

Categories: Health, Imperial Decline, Intersectionality, Mental Health, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Relationship, Soul, Therapy
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Learning To STFU … Or, Not

January 14, 2009

The historic way women of transsexed-histories have been told we must deal with our lives after transition has been that we must hide ourselves. Go to ground like a pursued animal and hide. That advice once took care of most problems of who knows and how. Under pain of death, (ok maybe not death, but the results would be terrible anyhow) we were told, we must never reveal ourselves. Sadly, such dicta were prescribed by “mental health professionals.” Of course, those mental health professionals weren’t hiding themselves forever from the world. They knew too well the adjustment problems such fear can cause. They’d have never told their children to do what they told others’ children to do.  

Alienation is a very real danger for human beings. If even a small number of the “sad, lonely and regretful” transitioners that Dr. Paul McHugh claimed to have found in post-op interviews and evaluations at the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic were “sad, lonely and regretful,” is there really any wonder? These women were told very basically that they were to remove themselves from their pasts and make brand-new lives from the ground up. For those who did, it was a feat that begged for adulation and recognition. I suspect though that most who did were running from vilification and dismissal by their families and friends and were overwhelmingly young. Afterall, back then they were required to be evaluated much as horse-flesh might be valued at a sale of thoroughbred colts.  

Historically, women of transsexed history started with “the importance of never being known.” The tradition made it certain there will be such arguments. I should hide myself, else all will flee in revulsion. The trope’s an old one meant to invoke fear. It’s succeeded more than it should have, more than has been healthy for my sisters. Now our fears have reached such a fever-pitch that we divide ourselves consistently over whether or not someone should own that she ever transsexed. Huge portions of life and experience are consistently denied. At least they are as much as they can be: the body and the mind remember. 

The ability to argue insightfully, to weigh ideas and actions within the experience of an individual and judge or at least evaluate them, the shibboleths one has attached to herself in the course of a life remain. They are used by everyone, regardless our histories until the brain atrophies from age or ill-use. 

The appeal of not telling is huge. I mean think about it. If you walk through your life post-transition and no one ever even suspects … how much further should I go with this? How much further must I go? I think I’ll stop there.

For you cis-sexuals try to get your mind around it this way if you haven’t already: you’ve made the move of the century in whatever area you pride yourself most and feel most connected with. You’ve given birth to six children in ten years and are almost forty and everyone seems truly amazed that you’ve ever given birth and that you’re not twenty-five!!  O hell, forget twenty-five: they think you’re nineteen!! How great a feeling would that be? How often would you smile and go on about your business without telling? 

Well, the same strokes are available for many women and men with transsexing histories. They feel good. It’s wonderful to be so well-acculturated that people don’t recoil with revulsion or keep you at a convenient arm’s length for something you had no control over whatsoever. People accept you as you! What more, when it comes to interior lives, could any of us want? 

Beginning to get the flavor? That would feel really good, no? It sure as heck would for me! It has and does. So, why might I risk that feeling for writing essays like this and publishing them here? Because sometimes, there are aspects of my life that make my life seem smallish and best used for the benefit of others, even if they cost me something I glory in. 

There’s no doubt that our guys, those who’ve transsexed, often have an easier time with the “looks” aspects of things. Testosterone, while not the default hormone for humans, surely seems able to make changes like cleft chins, body and facial hair and muscularity quite well. I suppose, though, that at thirty not even the powerful effects of T are gonna make someone who stopped growing at fourteen when they were 5’3″ into a six-footer. Yeah, that’s far too high an expectation. 

My friend Marlene has pointed out to me a few times that bone growth is set pretty much so very early that the likelihood of a woman “spreading” her hips after she’s ten or twelve is zero. The likelihood of one of the guys becoming as tall as the average male is also low, exponentially recedingly likely in fact. But, all things considered, it seems easier in some ways for the guys to look like guys than for the effects of testosterone to recede so completely in a female that it will be as though it had never been there. For that there are places like the offices in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco of The Big Three. They can rearrange faces and various other body-parts in those clinics quite well. 

Anyhow, that’s not the biggest point I want to make. Instead I’d thought I’d write today about fitting in and how that often plays out for those of us who have and do transsex, especially how it plays out amongst ourselves. We, after all, appear better able to notice, or at least think we can, who’s like us. We make great fusses amongst ourselves, all too often, about how everyone should lead her, or his, life so that they will do “best by the community.”   

Of course, what’s often not looked at is who the community is, or rather, who the community is becoming. For the moment there are a lot of us “old girls” and a right few “old boys” who manage to speak our minds “in the community.” As ever, you’ll find people strung along a continuum from very old to downright young who are part of the so-called community. In some places the community is quite strong amongst ourselves. In others, the community may well be a single individual.

Demographically we seem skewed by place here in the USA: New York, Boston, San Francisco (of course,) LA, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix appear, in my unscientific and random sample, to be hubs where people with transsexing histories are likely to be located. In Canada as well, and I would imagine this would hold true across the world, metropolitan areas will draw transsexing people more so than will small towns. Thus, one is more likely to meet another transsexed individual in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton or Calgary than in Thunder Bay I should think. Although I do recall, I think, one member of a forum I attended long ago who listed Thunder Bay, ON, as home. 

Again, I have gotten away from the focus in this piece. Please forgive, I’ll get there, at least I hope I will.

Back in the old days of transsexing as the periods between, say, 1974 and 1989 might be known, there was the rather openly held and enforced as much as possible “rule” that post-surgery transsexed people were to “blend seamlessly into the milieu they live in.” In other words, unless you were hell-bent on having people know, or you were unfortunate in having your tennis professionalism questioned, or you happened to be in acting or modeling and were “outed” as a result, or you wrote a book about yourself (think Renee Richards, Caroline Crossley, April Ashley, and Jan Morris) you got your surgery and disappeared into the background noise of everyday life.

It’s just a presumption, but I imagine a lot of that prescription had a lot to do with how comfortable universities, psychiatrists, and surgeons who worked with transsexers back then wre in wanting to stir as few pots as possible. There were other “rules” that judged things like height, weight, probable outcome of facial and body changes due to hormone replacement and overall “comportment” that could and did make or break transitions. The system was crushingly binary. Ideas like “comportment” were most often the ideas that the providers, usually male, had about “how women should behave and appear.” 

To be honest, a lot of the arguments and rancor that arise today among transsexed people (let me say it again, mainly among women) about the value of stealth, out, gatekeeping and exclusion often appear to be vestiges of that old process. One learns from one’s mentors. For very many years trans-support assigned an “older” transitioner (they may have been either younger or older in fact in relation to whom they mentored) to “guide” the just transitioning individual in the arcana of transition. Some “older” transitioners still mentor younger transitioners. 

One learned from those who had gone before and those who had gone before learned from those who had gone before them who learned from those very earliest women who had had surgeries and had moved silently and, one hopes, seamlessly, into the massive “binary” world we tend to live in. Somewhere, probably before the 1980s, but certainly after the 1980s, this pattern began to change. With the changes have come the tensions and the witheringly nasty arguments and movements that have become a source of hatred, dissension and downright abhorrence for so many of us.

Had a venue for a blog such as this existed in 1980 I would guarantee that the vast majority of transsexed women would have refused to have written it. It wasn’t good form. You found your mentorship in those metropolitan centers and in the clubs and groups that were focused primarily in such areas. If you were “out-in-the-country” you either remained ignorant and despairing or you moved yourself to a larger and more anonymous venue where you could contact and live among other transsexuals. Contact with others is a good thing, not a poor one. (Go skim these essays, I am, in totality, a “relational” proponent. We are social creatures and we don’t any of us do well in isolation.)

Yet, the pleas and demands of “the professionals” made it almost a certainty that when women transitioned we left the community and disappeared for the most part: married or remained single and never, ever, let on that our bodies and social roles had ever been anything other than what they were afterwards. It simply wasn’t done. And what must be admitted is that that is still a goal for many of us, hell, maybe most. I honestly have difficulty with the idea that I should walk about telling all and sundry, “I was once designated male.” I mean … would that make me happy? Not at the moment. Give the society a decade or two to wrap it’s collective mind around the idea.

The argument now often goes that in the 1970s exactly that was being done. The general population is claimed to have been reconciled with transsexing. There’s a smidgen of truth in that as a couple of states, Minnesota comes to mind and a few other states wrote into law back then that birth certificates would be changed and quarantined after “sex-changes.” So, there’s some reason for the argument that sex-changing was more accepted and that transsexing was better understood among the general population who have today been “prejudiced” against transsexing men and women by the great and terrible transgender peril. 

However, the late-1970s in the USA was also the time when the gender clinics came under fierce fire from within and without them. By 1979 Paul McHugh and Kurt Freund were already dismantling Johns Hopkins and within a few years every university gender clinic would be closed for the purposes of full transitions. Hopkins, for instance, still has “gender specialists” on staff. But, they haven’t surgeons any longer who perform Gender Confirmation Surgeries.

So, the argument that the rise of the “transgender” movement in the 1990s was the “cause” for the general public’s distaste for “transsexuality” is more than forced: it ignores the realities of the late 1970s and the reality that the clinics and the legal changes were being made before most anyone had heard the word “transgender.” When one removes the impossible, much as it might be distatsteful to me, one is left with something a bit more like the truth than a specious-causality will give her.

I mean, let’s get real here could events in 1978 and 1979 actually be affected by events that didn’t occur until 1983 or 1984? We have, in truth, no means of effecting the past from the future, the alleged Philadelphia Experiment  notwithstanding. So let’s consign that argument to the waste basket it should long ago have been consigned to and simply regard confused memory as the reason there are the current arguments that “transgender” rights have and will cause revocation of the rights of “true transsexuals.”

Instead lets take a look at a more likely reason for the revocation of rights and for the general disrepute that “true” transsexuals and other gender-variant folk have experienced since that so-called “golden age of the 1970s. Let’s consider for just a second the almost insignificant rise of religious rightism and the political sense that the USA was tired of “liberal experiementation” which resulted in Reaganism and the overwhelming acceptance of things like The Contract With America becoming popular and dominant socially.

Ah, no surely it must have been the machinations of Virginia Prince, not those of Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tom DeLay and the Reaganauts! Well, could you just think about that for awhile and see what you can come up with? I’m gonna move along a bit.

In the 1990s the advent of the Internetz started changes in regard to the “pat story” of transsexing women. Information became easier to obtain through various early list-serves and there was a more open discussion among people who were inclined to transsex than had existed before, at least among those who were able to connect to the ‘Net through work or at home. At the same time older women who had spent so very much effort and heart in following the “rules of the game” were still amongst us, often in positions where they were able to join in such conversations. Experience is a powerful teacher and experience will be given as it was lived.

Dicta that were absorbed in 1976 were continuously given pride of place among transsexing women. Much of that transmitted experience, or the desire for a similar experience, remains a powerful force within the community today. Times may change and demand that experience change as well. But those who lived the experience will likely not be so open to the change. Why, for the simplest reason: we tend to think of new ways as somehow making our old ways invalid or not as good. It’s the “it was good enough for grandmaw and it’s good enough for me” syndrome translated to transsexing.   

A tension began to develop between old and new transitioners. With the state of the Web today more than ever before we are seeing younger and younger people on forums that a few years ago were dominated by those of us who are now well into middle age and many of us who are decidedly even older than that. The demographics have changed and everything old is new again. Or everything old no longer holds the aura of complete wisdom that it once did. Again, a natural reaction among those who experienced the old is to feel denied in some ways of their efficacy, their voice of experience.  

The tensions have not ameliorated over the past five years. In fact, they have seemingly become worse. Younger transitioners are not similarly inclined to follow the precepts of many older transitioned women. (Again, I use “women” instead of “men” because my experience tells me that these arguments and the sheer divide between “older” and “younger”, “stealth” and “out,” “HBS-movement” and just “plain ole HBS” are functionally more a piece of the lives of transsexed women than of transsexed men.)

Our younger generation of transitioners seems less likely to be as disturbed by “gender-variance” than are older transitioners. They seem less inclined as well to be as flush capitally as the older transitioners sometimes have been. Thus, they sometimes use every means available to afford the expensive surgeries required to reach a post-transitional state. To do so they often make use of their bodies in ways very similar to those ways other women have chosen: they use their sex to do what they cannot do with their position,prestige, and economic status. They pay for surgeries and often get stick for doing so. 

As in any basically generational conflict (by the way, it’s not entirely generational. I’ve experienced women who are 19 or 20 be just as adamantly dismissive of “transgender” as any older woman. I’ve also experienced many “older” women who are more than willing to embrace the validity of people who don’t do things the way they did. So the generational thang isn’t always generational at all except in where I see the conflict-seeds being originally sown.) 

The younger transitioners in areas like dating, sex-work and just plain sex, acceptance of gender-diversity, lack of worry about “what the transgenders are gonna do to us” and in other battleground areas tend to be more open to difference. My older sisters appear, more often than not, to be more exclusively inclined. There ya have it: breaks and battles, demeaning arguments fought with every bit of the force and “true believer” ferocity as any partisan battle about anything, from Shiite/Sunni to Mainline/Evangelical to Socialist/Capitalist. Each “side” seems very convinced that they are “right.” Middle-ground appears a good place to be battered on both sides of one’s body.

So, what’s a girl to do? Generally this girl speaks her mind and “calls ’em like she sees ’em.” What she sees is animosity and dissension where there doesn’t need to be dissension and animosity. My sense of being “right” doesn’t mean, perforce, that I have to batter someone else with invective, name-calling and witheringly-directed hatred in an all-consuming effort to “win.”

In point of fact, I suspect that winning is consistently in the mind of the debater. Each person believes she has “won.” Yet, the “loser’ usually will also declare herself the “winner.” Just as I pointed out in yesterday’s essay the activity is everso reminiscent of sandlot baseball games among pre-adolescent boys. “Winning,” “cheating,” “making-up the rules as you go” appears to apply to each “side.” The backyard becomes a raucous and nasty fist-fight that leaves only animosity and the prevailing sense that “we’ll play ya again next Saturday and you’ll see.”

Let’s be honest here: if someone decides to transition and does so through an orchiectomy rather than through Genital Confirmation Surgery, I may find that my take was different than their’s on the subject. But, does difference also mean that they, or I, am unreal, un-true? Does it mean that for one of us to exist in the world and be able to live our lives in some relative peace that the other must be exiled to some desert-margin where they’ll be neither seen nor heard? Must “my way or the highway” be the ultimate litmus-test of my sense that another human being is valid and worthy of my esteem?

Well, no. For me it doesn’t mean that at all.  

Until “they,” whomever “they” happens to be (wish we knew so we could take steps to annul the forces of “they” before “they” could do any real damage to any of us!) deprive me of my life, liberty and pursuit of property as John Locke dictated, then they haven’t done me a lot of damage, except maybe in my ego. Like most egos mine can probably use a bit of downsizing on occasion. 

It’s all well and good to declare that “she isn’t real because she made a sex movie using her penis. I saw it and she admits it and everyone knows that real women don’t use their penises.” OK, but perhaps women who have no other way to pay to bring their bodies and brains into alignment do use their penises. It doesn’t mean they’re not damaged by the sex-trade. It doesn’t make them less-than. It simply means they have employed what was available in order to get the job done. Period. I mean, let’s be real; that’s one of the major dicta of the “true transsexual movement.” “True transsexuals” go all the way at any price, so cut the girl on the street a break. 

Or, you who are well-employed or professional and who’ve made it, might consider the good that could be done by donating a portion of your treasure to the establishment of  trust that could accumulate donations and employ a couple of people that would assist in helping those who cannot transition fully due to lack of being able to fund transition. I’ve seen the idea broached, but never seen any evidence that it’s been placed into the “reality” we wish to argue so relentlessly over. In fact, the only times I have ever seen that done to date have been efforts by people who were struggling themselves to assist those they felt were struggling even more. The so-called and much cited “successful” transitioners don’t appear willing to set up a foundation at this time. 

So it goes. Our battles rage and the battle-cry is often “Shut The Fuck Up because you are full of crap.” I dunno about the efficacy of that particular tactic for bringing people together. I’ve heard that, or something similar, for years myself, beginning with my father when I faced him lo-many-years-ago on a Saturday morning with “I am a girl and I’m gonna be a woman.” The belting that resulted lasted a while and certainly got some immediate results, even some long-range ones. I never again spoke with my father about myself, my truly deep self.  

But, here I sit many years later being exactly who I said I was gonna be, just another woman, writing a blog and posting it out there for you to read. I suspect that the current arguments that resolve themselves into “STFU” will prove to be similarly successful: at causing and maintaining division and dislike. The new ways will eventually win out, for the old are dying. Soon there will be a new “pat story” for transsexually-historied women and men.

To be very honest, I hope to live to see the day when the old passes quietly into the peace of history and women and men are just fine with being themselves, fully, however they are most comfortable being full. 

Categories: Lookism, Psychology, Relationship, Transgender, Transitional Dichotomies, Transsexing, Transsexuals
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Comments: 16 Comments

Gaming Therapists, Gaming Ourselves

December 11, 2008

Probably the most persistent of questions that one finds on the Netz where TG people gather revolve around issues of therapy. Those seem to cause the most trepidation, anger, resentment, off-hand advice I ever read at any forum. The vast majority of transsexed women and men have followed the therapy route and the WPATH Standards of Care model in traversing the area between one sex and the other. (Apologies to other people in the TG-spectrum who identify themselves as something other than one of two sexes. I’m more comfortable with that approach. Although I understand and embrace that others don’t hold with the binary, I find it convenient to use “sex” as a binary while writing. It sorta pares down things and I write long enough sentences anyway.)  🙂 

Newly discovering transitioners come full of questions and can be given some pretty glaringly poor advice, brilliant advice, and advice based on pre-conceptions and self-experiences that they know nothing at all about. Just because we have experienced working with a therapist doesn’t make us conversant with “the -state-of-the-art” nor with evaluating how “good” or “bad” a particular clincian might be. No more than does having gone through six forms or grades of schooling make one conversant with the running of an educational system. 

So, two rules to start for those asking about therapy and therapists: 1) try to be careful of resentful evaluations. Everyone has responses to stimuli that are different than are others. Most TS-spectrum individuals have spent years in what have been “hidden” or confrontational and shameful interactions with others. Maybe more than most, or at least many, others. We have hidden ourselves (see yesterday’s post) often for excellent reasons. There will be an internal tension toward revealing one’s self that is a natural reaction to one’s past and one’s fears and hopes. All of those will shade our perceptions of the therapist we meet with and color our evaluations.

2) Therapists practice in varying ways. Some take very directive and intentional tactics when working with any patient. Think of it as a medical model. “I’m the doctor. I’ve had 10 years of schooling and 20 years of practice and I know what works best.” Others may take a more openly client-centered approach and would prefer that the client guide sessions into areas of concern. Still others will fall on a spectrum somewhere between the two poles, sometimes leading and sometimes following. 

3) Try to get some handle on how you feel about therapy anyway. If you are convinced that therapy means you are seen as “mentally-ill” then your thoughts will take part in the therapeutic interaction and will also highlight for anyone the way they view or did view their work with a therapist. Often our inclination will be to simply say, “This is in me and I know more about what’s best for me than anyone else.” There’s a lot of truth in that; but, beware. You also believed until recently that hiding in plain sight in a body and life you were uncomfortable with was “the best way for you.” Simply changing your mind and having experienced transition doesn’t suddenly prove “I was right all along.” 

The consistently best summary I find on the internet of approaching therapy for TG people is on Andrea James’ TSRoadMap site. Ms. James presents some excellent povs concerning therapy and warns and cautions prospective clients in a lucid and practical fashion. She doesn’t make broad generalizations about “therapy in general” nor does she recommend specific therapists, even though her own experiences with therapy during and after transition appear to have been positive ones.

If you use the link above, look to the left column of buttons and under the heading Well Being click on Therapy. She runs a top-notch operation and the links she provides to clearinghouse sites for those who practice gender-therapy are excellent. Dr. Becky, gender.org and IFGE maintain their respective lists quite up-to-date. (You can find all three in the blogroll, forums and clearinghouses to you right on the Home page of this blog. Although none are totally comprehensive; they are all well-stocked with people who you can at least find in your area or somewhere fairly close. 

Andrea’s first rule comes at the head of her section on therapy: 

Self-acceptance and coming to terms with your feelings are the first order of business in transition. For that, it’s very useful to see a therapist. Even if you know how you feel and know what you want to do.

I find the advice to be absolutely spot-on. Sex change is a very personal and intimate process, accepting and coming to terms with one’s self. In that regard I know a number of transsexed people who have been so personal and intimate with their discoveries that they haven’t worked well with therapists at all. They have felt blocked, abused, misunderstood and otraged when the therapist declined to follow the transitioner’s prescription for what needed to be done and when. 

Absolutely, matters can seem to the transitioner like they will never get there fast enough. It can seem to the transitioner that if they don’t, for instance, get a recommendation for an endocrinologist and for starting hormone-therapy tomorrow that the therapist is being hard-line or is “out-to-get-me.” 

In the case of a late-transitioning woman this can come about through a volatile mixture of accumulated “male-privilege” (I always know best. And I can do this myself without any input from you. Hell, I’m competent because I am me, dammit, look at the job I do,) frantic attempts to outrun the aging process as exemplified by male pattern baldness, growing stomach fat-storage, etc, and inherent fear that someone “waited too long” anyway. Given a reluctance among professionals to simply give away their reputations on the insistence of a client that they need this right now, impasses form and recrimination, especially within the clients, ensue. 

I don’t think most evaluations of a therapist done with these factors in play are particularly valid. There is no doubt that some practitioners might well see the opportunity for making a little extra cash by lengthening the number of visits between each step. But, I suspect such motivations, although often to the forefront of complaints on TG forums, have little reality in fact. There are ethical guidelines that therapists must follow. Deviation from those guidelines is often disciplined with loss of the ability to practice one’s employment. It’s gonna cost the therapist more than it’s worth to prolong your process indefinitely. One complaint often brings down a house of cards when it’s investigated. 

On the other hand, what transitioners seem to forget is this. “If I as a programmer, executive, attorney, doctor, military officer, construction fore-person or architect sign-off on something without at least investigating it somewhat to be sure of its efficacy and truthfulness, then I open myself to severe sanctions, loss of reputation and disasterous consequences to which I will be held accountable.” I imagine very few attorneys would spend five minutes on a brief and then forward it through the process of it’s being used in a cause celebre action. They wish to show their competence, not their incompetence, so they would take time over the presentation, probably lots of time.

I would imagine that no programmer/systems administrator would input code into the systems they are responsible for without checking that the code would actually do what they were being told it would do. I doubt that a doctor would, as a matter of course, surgically remove the gall bladder of a patient who demanded that without first ascertaining that the gall bladder required removal. Not to do so would be to open one’s self to severe sanctions. So, too, with therapists. 

Yet, all too often, I’ve experienced transitioners complain that their therapist was trying to “derail my transition” by making them wait needlessly. As a professional I see the need to make as certain of the client’s state of committment, past associations with dysphoria, internal feelings as I can before I sign my name and license over to them in the form of a letter-of-recommendation. That’s a person’s life and livlihood on the line for me when I have avoided sessions, openly (you’d be surprised what can be seen when you’re trained to observe it) sand-bagging approaches to one’s internal workings and emotional content, and a general  demand that “I be given my way or else” approach to the process. You’d not do that in your own job. Why would you imagine someone else should do that for you? 

I have argued that the gate-keeping process hampers the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist and I believe it does. I also believe that transitioners very much should have a therapist who can work with them, guide them, follow them and hold and hear their inmost yearnings, doubts and struggles. No, a “friend” or “friends” on a bulletin board forum cannot do that, if they could anyone could buy a license to practice. I’m sorry, I’m not going to trust a fry-cook at McDonalds with my innermost stirrings because yesterday they decided they should be a therapist today. 

Andrea also has some great advice about what one should ask those “friends” and recommends that if at all possible the “friends” be people one can speak with IRL (in real life.) Again, she’s spot-on. 

Ask about rates, hours, schooling, etc., but the main thing is to ask about the therapist’s style, opinions, and policies. Some therapists require more than others before they’ll recommend hormones or surgery. Some use a kind of weeding-out policy, trying to test your conviction. Some feel they are gatekeepers who must keep people from making mistakes, and require a lot of sessions. Others are much more open or easy-going.

Ethics of professional associations do not mandate particular practices for the members of those boards. They simply define the parameters within which the professional will work. For instance, there’s no ethical mandate that a therapist will not try to weed-out in their approach. It may be a fairly uncomfortable process for a transitioner to be consistently confronted about her feelings, her statements regarding her transition, especially when she feels time is of the essence. Yet, some of the most valuable interactions I have had with supervisors, reviewers, my own therapists and professors have been in the way of having to defend absolutely everything I thought, wrote or did in particular situations.

Was it comfortable at the time? No, well, hell no. But was it valuable for me to have to do that?  Yes, very valuable. I had to question myself and my responses. I had to apply myself to myself and see as truly as possible why and how I had operated the way I did. At the same time one of the most critical professors I had in terms of demanding that I justify my actions in case studies I had to write on for her class totally floored me when I sent her a critique of my own work. Instead of agreeing with my fine-toothed comb and negative evaluation of my own work, she pointed out to me what I had missed.

The client was not ready. You were. Your instincts were absolutely right-on. What happened wasn’t that you failed the client at all. You did great work with her. She realized that she wasn’t ready to work yet with what she thought she was ready to work with. Yes, she went to another program and discontinued working with you, but not due to your mistakes. Instead, she saw that she had to try to work with (this) and (that) first before she could go where she’d told you she wanted to go. You did brilliant work and she recognized that she was totally out of her depth. So she went to a place that could work with (this and that.)

I still doubted my success. But was totally surprised that this “hard-assed” professor didn’t take the opportunity to be hard-assed with me. I mean, I was definitely critical of myself. In fact, I was so caught-up in the client moving elsewhere that I was incapable of bringing the analysis of the sitaution to my paper the way the professor was able to do by reading the transcripts of the sessions. I was blinded by my own sense of loss (counter-transference) and by my inability to see past my own feelings. The professor showed me that. Although I have to admit that I still think about that client and what I could have done differently and have retained her as a client. The fact remains: probably nothing except what I did do. *sigh*  

Opposition is not always a bad thing. It can help us to see cracks and fissures in our plans and timelines. It can show us areas we still require working in before we’re absolutely ready to move to the next transitional stage. Better, it seems to me, have that before one’s surgery than after. That much less work to do later on. Because, later on, we’ll still have problems. It’s inevitable. 

However, the impulse remains, quite naturally, among some tranitioners to “game the system,” to get what I want when I want it and caution or discovery be damned. OK, I understand the impetus; but, I still maintain that sometimes the transitioner should be slowed in her headlong rush. Self-discovery and self-acceptance are always worthy attainments. The therapist who cares enough, is skilled enough, to demand that I do that for him or her should be held by me to be a “good therapist” not as one who “wants to derail me.” I am perfectly capable of “derailing” myself and have to admit many occurrences of that in my life. 

Thus, the therapist who will question me and try to get me to be sure of myself is not a harm to me. She’s an asset to me. Perhaps rather than attempting to circumvent the process by avoiding contact for months until “I can walk in and show her physically I am a complete woman except for that one little item so she will have to write me a letter right now”, is not the best tactic for the headlong transitioner to take. Perhaps self-discovery and acceoptance, as Andrea points out, are much more important than “getting my way now.” 

It’s a wonderful thing to have someone outside myself point out something positive to me. One of my therapists elated me one night when she talked about seeing me come toward her building and thought “what great female energy that woman has.” She didn’t recognize me in the gathering darkness until I was very close to her window. Yet, that same night she also pointed out to me some areas that I hadn’t worked much on. That didn’t feel particularly good, but it was valuable. 

Andrea goes on to say at the end of her piece: 

I have a friend who went to a gender therapist who said, “You’re not TS… you’re just a swishy little faggot.” No lie. While most people won’t run into that extreme an example, if it looks like your therapeutic relationship is not going to lead to the outcome you desire, you should go elsewhere. My friend had her SRS this year, and got letters from other therapists. Don’t stay with a therapist if the outcome you desire looks hopeless.

Again, excellent advice. There is absolutely no reason to remain with a therapist who expresses open and immediate disbelief that what one is embarking on is a hopeless venture. There may come a time when the transitioner finds that she believes that herself. But an immediate response like the one above is a sure sign that things will not go well. You don’t need a cheerleader all of the time, but you do need someone who is vested in the efficacy of the process itself.   

You will also, no doubt, find therapists who will almost casually pass you along. Such people may sound like they are really exactly what you want. If you find one, however, I’d recommend that you do not make use of them. No one is immediately able to evaluate another person for what she needs and what she wants and for the things that may require some internal work before she’s ready to proceed.

The therapist who works that way is no better than the one Andrea cited above. In fact, in most ways he may be worse. To move with no resistance at all makes no one better or more fulfilled later on. In fact, that tactic may do just the opposite and leave you with glaring holes in your psyche and your abilities that will bring you huge amounts of pain later. It will feel unbelievably good in that moment “I can do whatever I want.” But could well lead to much more pain in your life later. 

Andrea closes her writing with this general personal viewpoint about therapy. 

Keep in mind that if there’s a specific thing you seek (such as hormones), you may be able to get those directly from a physician without therapy.

However, I feel seeing a therapist is very important. I learned a lot in therapy, about myself and about the best way to transition. I believe self-acceptance is the key to transition, and therapy can help with this. The other important thing is realistic planning and expectations, and again, a therapist can be very useful for helping shape your plan based on your specific needs.

The biggest problem with therapeutic relationships involving a gatekeeper mentality is that clients are prone to hold back information that might jeopardize their chance to get the approval letters they seek. This can make therapy less about helping you adjust and more of an adversarial relationship. It’s best to find a therapist you trust.

I have continued therapy after SRS and have found it very helpful. Often, emotions and problems that were not adequately dealt with during transition can catch up with you upon completion. I opted to go to a different therapist who has no experience with gender issues following transition.

 

Again, the perspective seems to me a very good one. There are, of course, areas a gender-therapist will not cover with you. Some of those lacunae will arise because of your sense that they don’t need work or the therapist’s inability to pull those out of you regardless. Andrea’s advice about therapy after physical transition also seems about right to me. Hammers see nails everywhere. Gender therapists are no different than any other hammer. They may well see the problem left behind as an aspect of one’s gender dysphoria when it may not be that at all. 

If you are going to do therapy afterwards, I’d recommend it, you might wish to retain the same therapist as you worked with before. But that may not be a positive action. You might do better to hire someone who doesn’t see your world through the eyes of a gender-specialist. You may well wish to work with someone who has a different perspective of your problem and your life as the person you are now rather than the one who transitioned. Fresh-eyes are often more observant than eyes that have looked at the same thing for a long while. 

Fresh and different perspectives may help you to see yourself a bit better as well. Afterall the important thing is one’s own health and well being. With that in mind, if you are just beginning this “gender-journey” allow me to warn you that it will come with a price. It seems that everything worth having does. One price will be that you should make good use of the system rather than trying to circumvent and “game it” every chance you get. The fact is, you’re only “gaming” yourself. None of us are as self-aware as we sometimes like to believe. 

The fact that for years I lived an internal life that was closed to “out there” for a few different reasons for a long time doesn’t mean that my introspection gave me an unjaundiced and accurate view of myself. In fact, the very opposite may well more often be true. That closing down, that total internalization of my desire, motivation, reactions, emotional responses and my sorrows, may have done just the opposite. It may well have closed me to possibilities and depths that I will never find without some serious exploration in a new voice, a new key.

My own pov is never THE Right One. It’s only a point of view from the place I stand now. It’s not necessarily a guide at all to where I have yet to go. A few feet to the left or the right and I may find that there are mountains beyond the mountain I am climbing. I may find the view at the top is only toward a much longer and arduous journey than I had contemplated from back there.  

If you have some idea in you that you can, or should, “game” your therapist, I’d warn you off of that approach. It will almost certainly rebound against your long-term interests. You’ll “game” yourself into playing the same cat-and-mouse games with others that you have played already in your life. You may well find that “reaching your heart’s desire” was more on the order of reaching into hell itself and bringing some along with you. 

Each to her or his own desire.

A cautionary note though: I’ve found more than once that what I thought I desired I truly had no desire for once the ramifications and consequences of that desire came to be experienced. Try, no matter how anxious and ready-to-go you believe you are, to keep that caveat in mind. A gender-journey can be wonderful and fulfilling for he or she who walks it prepared as much as possible. Or it can lead to steep ravines and deadly chasms for he or she who rushes into and through it headlong. Try to enjoy yours, wherever it might lead you. 


Categories: Communicating, Deception, Mental Health, Psychology, Relationship, Therapy, Transgender, Transition, Transsexing, Transsexuals
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Comments: 22 Comments

Hiding In Plain Sight …

December 10, 2008

… is, to be honest, perhaps a good thing for Purloined Letters, but perhaps on the order of Emperors and new clothes for human beings. People can be taught to lie or to at the very least obfuscate and divert or remain very, very quiet by circumstances, life-preservation, teaching, inclination, fear, a desire for “a greater good,” actually, for any number of reasons. After awhile telling a lie or learning to keep one’s mouth closed can become an art-form.

So, Radha, more “internalized transphobia?” I don’t really think so, simply because I intend to chat today about myself. Once again, the previous dictum holds true: if you think you see yourself here, (unless you happen to be one of the folks I mention by name later on down the page) you are mistaken. This is simply about my observations of my own life. If it applies to others as well … well, sometimes that’s just the nature of things and isn’t meant as an indictment of you should you read this. Let alone does it mean to be an indictment of transsexed or transsexing people. My basic thought about us as a group is that we usually lie more to ourselves than to others.

By the time others hear us speak of our lives or our thoughts, the lying to ourselves has become so deeply ingrained that we believe it to be true. Therefore, if you hear it from us in that regard, you are probably hearing exactly what we believe. Press us and we are likely to give you that … the truth as we know it. Trouble is that the knowing has often been ingrained by our circumstances, by our consistently negative reactions from those we love most growing up. One learns to hide, at some point, what is quite literally unspeakable.

Thus, as time wanders us through our lives most former and current transsexuals I’ve had occasion to hear and read have learned not to give much away about ourselves. When coupled with the historic admonitions of therapists and surgeons and others we have sought for relief and treatment, then the act itself has become ingrained within us that something bad is gonna happen if I tell you that I transsexed. Yes, a rather circular causation perpetuated, likely enough, by the very people we have learned to trust as we reached adulthood after having a rather large dose of that same “never speak of this” attitude ingrained in us by those we loved as children.

We grow up with very decided notions about how much of ourselves we should give others and usually there are people in our adult lives who manage by their reactions to us to press home that very childhood ingraining. The trip through learning to break-down such fortifications to our souls and hearts certainly provides spouses, significant others, even other transsexed or transsexing people we learn to know with many hours of very maddening experience of how tough it can be to love someone whose very attitude to love and relationship may have been based on the fact that love hurts and the beloved requires one to lie about her or himself for others to be able to show her their love. 

Knowing that might be true seems cold comfort at best for those who make attempts to support, encourage, provide guidance and care for their adult transsexing  loved  ones. The ingrained notion that most people of transsexing histories that I know has been “whatever you do don’t let them know.” That way be dragons: fearsome, roaring and terrible dragons. 

The problem of those of us who make lives in the “opposite gender” is often visited on our spouses, children, best friends and relatives. I don’t think the problem is intentional, at least not all the time. But I do believe that the problem is habitual and widespread. The truly hopeful thing about more and more children being heard these days by their parents is that perhaps those confining and mad-making walls are beginning, just a bit, to crumble. 

More and more often the “researches” of practitioners like Dr. Kenneth Zucker are being recognized as not only delaying the inevitable for about 20% of children with gender-dysphoric conditions, but as being possibly unethical or even legal breaches. The following excerpt from a paper published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, (2008) Vol. 5, pp. 1892-1897 (midway through page 1896 during their summary of ethical and legal implications Drs. (PhD) Cohen-Kettenis, Delemarre-van de Waal and Gooren) opines about treatment of dysphoric youth under currently prevailing policies that emanate from places like CAMH (Centre for Addictions and Mental Health) and are publicized by non-professional religious-based organizations such as Focus On The Family. 

… in judging the desirability of hormonal pubertal suppression as a first but reversible phase in the sex reassignment procedure, one should not only take consequences of the intervention into account. Rather, one should also consider the consequences of nontreatment. Nonintervention is not a neutral option, but has clear negative lifelong consequences for the quality of life of those individuals who had to wait for treatment until after puberty. It may lead to irresponsible and risky, unhealthy actions of the patient in order to get access to the desired medication, distrust against professionals, with negative consequences for other aspects of their health care. It may lead to developmental arrest, and a psychological functioning forever hampered by shame about one’s appearance. This implies that “in dubio abstine” may actually be harmful. Not different from other endeavors in medicine, the care for gender dysphoric juveniles must be open to peer review and scientific scrutiny, which has always featured high on the agenda of the Dutch health care for transgendered subjects.

Realizing the potential harmfulness of nonintervention, one may wonder whether not providing treatment may not only be doubtful on ethical grounds, but also have legal implications. … 

Although many parents, as highlighted in the now-famous NPR piece last May that featured Zucker, still remand their children to the care of Dr. Zucker and other “reparative therapists” to quash dysphoria in children, they often do so with the best of intentions. I imagine they do so as well without Dr. Zucker owning his obvious Neo-Conservative politics and the fact that other research gives the lie to his program. This is in spite of the fact that Dr. Zucker himself and, in other research, Dr. Cohen-Kettenis both affirm that GID persists into adulthood in about 20% of the patients examined.

In view of the fact that Dr. Zucker claims adult homosexuality is the primary “positive outcome” of such “reparative” therapies one might ask what, exactly, is the point of pursuing such courses if statistically-speaking the result is nil?  Dr. Cohen-Kettenis’ paper reports that in the children whose dysphoria remitted the general outcome (within 10.5 years on average) was that the adult children became either homosexual or bisexual. (If Dr. Zucker follows the lead of Dr. Ray Blanchard, his mentor at CAMH he would disbelieve that bisexuals actually exist at all, but are another form of homosexual orientation.)

In looking back on my own life I can see where a treatment protocol like that recommended in the Cohen-Kettenis, Delemarre-van de Waal, Gooren paper might have meant a lot less angst and pain for me. It might have meant as well that loved ones would have viewed me with a better sense of “who she really is.” Research today shows more and more signs, hopeful signs, that what we call transsexuality is on the verge of total acceptance within the scientific and clinical community as a biological fact. It also tends to show that current methods of transsexing are efficacious and even more efficacious for transsexual youth.

It seems to me a possibility in about four years that the American Psychiatric Association “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders might well de-list Gender Dysphoria. Perhaps the APA will in fact recommend that clinicians treat the depressions and personality disorders associated more with the results of the “reparative” therapies employed by parents, teachers, ministers and doctors when we were maturing. Such reparative therapies tend, in my own experience, to undermine the self-esteem and confidence of the transsexing child. Such tactics are I believe the bases of much of the shame, deception, holding and silence we learned as coping mechanisms for childhood to young adult negative and traumatic experiences in the reactions of figures of love and authority in our lives to our very being. 

In the vast majority of current people who transsex one discovers again and again the heightened value of “keeping quiet,” of lying or in other ways deceiving (some of that no doubt caused by experiences such as those of children who pass through CAMH currently for “repair”) others about the reality of our existences. The major results that I read and hear about have been extreme anger and shame, guilt, loss of self-esteem, withdrawal from healthy relationship and intense secrecy. 

To be quite honest about the matter we see the results or have seen the results of programs designed to suppress, change or otherwise de-couple minorities from their heritage, their open and thriving lives in all sorts of places in the world, from the Ainu in Japan, to blacks in USA, Maoris in New Zealand, Aborigines in Australia, Amerinds in USA, Central America, South America and Canada, Aleuts, Inuit and other indigenous peoples in Canada and Russia.

The true actual results of such experimentations have shown again and again the severe depression, loss of relationship, lack of self-esteem and out-right demeaning of other humans to their lowest possible state. Why would we find it somehow unusual that in enacting such regimes of disparagement and “repair” among transsexuals, intersexuals, transgenders, lesbians and homosexuals those results would somehow become positive outcomes for social accomodation within our own children? Those “reparative therapies” are neither therapeutic nor do they repair anything at all that doesn’t heal itself or can be healed with hormonal and surgical interventions in current daily practice. The resultant pain both of individuals so conditioned and their adult loved ones due to “reparative therapies” should come as no surprise to anyone at all. 

Repression has been shown again and again to lend itself not to health, but to abject misery and ingrained subterfuge and self-hate. 

Thus, do we think it an oddity when transsexing people “lie” to us? Is there some nefarious principle at work that makes our own children and their responses to us somehow different than the responses of other suppressed and rejected peoples around the world? Is it odd, for instance, that transsexuals, many battered and demeaned young women or men  and Indian hijras often make their livings in the sex-trade or other negatively-viewed employments? Is it somehow against the grain that transsexing people will “hide ourselves” as we grow up or that in many cases we “wait” to transsex until we are older and have developed careers in lines of endeavor that are “more honorable” and much more monetarily lucrative?

Yet, the J. Michael Baileys, Alice Dregers and other neo-Conservative “thinkers” and “researchers” make grand and vacuous etiologies that basically say something on the order of “younger MTF transsexing people often have jobs in hair-salons, massage parlors, as wait-staff in restaurants or in the sex-trade and tend to be better-looking and more desireable as sexual partners than do older MTF transsexuals who almost always are uglier, have married at some point and have jobs in more lucrative, male-oriented fields.” 

The very indictment itself is an indictment of the socio-political bent of its proponents and would be true if tested in Amerinds, Maoris, Aborgines, Bushmen, Americans of African descent and any other ruthlessly repressed minority you might find across the world. Yet, such “thinkers” then propose that a normal human reaction to unrelenting repression and degradation somehow negates the validity of what the repressed and traumatized person says about herself. (I’ve used MTFs and female pronouns because the above-mentioned “researchers” seldom if ever bother to “research”FTM-spectrum trangender people. Why? Because they immediately ignore and make-believe such folk do not exist because the basis of their “theories” exclude women of any kind from any consideration in their alleged etiologies. (For instance, “women are not sexual” and other jejune Neo-Freudian clap-trap.)

The repression and the degradation become self-fulfilling examples of degraded and repressed individuals. Surprise!

The claims and so-called researches of people like Drs. Zucker, Blamchard, Dreger, Anne Lawrence, J. Michael Bailey and their adherents are based on self-fulfilling researches that make a “law” of the obvious. For instance, do you suppose that if a female-spectrum transsexual began anti-androgens and hormone therapy at age 16 that she would probably better fit the socio-cultural idea of beauty and sexual attractiveness than would a similar female-spectrum transsexual who began anti-androgens and hormone therapy at fifty-five? 

The “evidence” and the surmises of such “researchers” require absolutely no “scientific” refutation for two reasons: their arguments are not based on science to begin with, they are based on cultural and social prejudices that ignore “facts.” Their hypotheses are set-up in such a way that any results showing some divergence from the original thesis of the “researcher” is the result of lying, tampering or some other contaminant. In other words, their “research” is not subject to one of the major premises of the Scientific Method: that the hypothesis can be falsified. The dicta of these gentlemen and ladies cannot be falsified, they have rigged the hypotheses to be that way. Ironically such rigging removes them from any claim to being scientific at all. 

There is no excuse being made in these paragraphs for why you may have experienced having a transsexing person hidden in full view of you. Rather there is the claim: how could it be otherwise? For it to have been in some way otherwise would have been to have any transsexing persons not yet teenagers to have experienced a radically different general way of growing up and being conditioned in their social milieus. 

That only seldom occurred. For proof in similar populations look first to so-called “passing-as-white” persons of color in the United States in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s. How many of those people who had at least one parent of color, yet were viewed as being only products of caucasian unions stepped forth and demanded that they be stricken of the privileges they had accrued by being seen as white? How many chose instead to live under the yoke of national segregation and degradation? Of course, you’re allowed to find people in other cultures than the USA who managed to do the same while their people-of-origin were degraded and shamed in other lands as well. Try Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan. Now that research might be worth doing. But I’d suggest that what you will find is a vanishingly small percentage of such folks who did “the right thing” and owned their subservient birth-rights. 

There are, indeed, transsexed and transsexing people who will lie to you. They have lived lives where they have been conditioned to lie even to themselves about their own knowledges of themselves, their own feelings, hopes and dreams for themselves. They’ve become, sadly, inured to such lives through the conditioning they’ve received from their caregivers, ministers and teachers. They’ve been repeatedly marginalized and held to be as fantastic as gryffons, mermaids and dragons. Is it wondrous in some way that what they, we, have learned at our great cost is not easily done away with, even in the interests of our own health and well-being?

There are your questions for the month, the year. Isn’t it time that we found a new answer and made a new way? Isn’t it time that we stop requiring our children, our relatives, our friends to go into hiding in plain sight? 

 

 

Categories: Connection, Deception, Fear, Gender, Mental Health, Transsexuals
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Real Girls, Part Two: Theory and Reality

October 28, 2008

 

Thus, came news over the weekend. At a Forum I frequent one poster attempted to place the item in a couple of places: against the rules, no cross-posting. But I can understand the impulse. No one enjoys having her life reduced to whether or not scientific proof can be found that basically makes her a part of the human genome rather than an object of psychological exploration by the likes of the CAMH/Northwestern sexological axis. Much better regarded is the research emanating from Melbourne and UCLA. 

Taken together with studies performed over the past ten years by researchers (biological/medical ones, not the psychological gim-crackery of the CAMH/Northwestern groups who mainly do “thought-experiments”) at The Free University of Amsterdam and at Goettingen University on the BSTc and the proof for brain-sex, there’s growing and compelling evidence that transsexuals, and possibly other gender-divergent people, are exactly who we have always said we were.

The latest release of research from The Prince Henry’s Institute in Melbourne adds, as Zoe Brain says, another piece, a small one, but an important one, in the puzzle of transsexuality. There’s a fashion in which sex is absolutely not the well-defined and currently accepted binary with no exceptions that we have lived with for millenia. As one finds and places those puzzle pieces into the frame one sees, without doubt anymore, that to be “male” is not always a matter of having “male-genitalia” and even “male chromosomes.” Nor is being female relegated a priori  to women born with 46xx chromosomes and a vagina and ovaries. Brain-sex, much maligned in some areas around Chicago, Illinois, USA, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has become over the past few years a fact that now requires proof that it isn’t true, rather than simply a pronunciamento by psychologists and psychiatrists that trans-folk have mental disorders.

Yep, I’ve halluncinated or imagined my entire life. How utterly psychotic is that?   

No longer can “the experts” simply declare, as have Kenneth Zucker, J. Michael Bailey and their ilk, that something is true if he says it’s true regardless the provenance of that particular brand of truth. Unless, of course, someone comes along with “scientific refutation” of a way-of-thinking he’s comfortable with.

O, by the way, Zucker and crew get to decide whether or not the proof is acceptable, because they “don’t believe in brain-sex.” Silly notion that, no? As if Luna had a vote about whether she was planet or moon? Or a neutrino deciding that it wasn’t an atomic particle? Or me deciding that you are not truly human because you don’t meet my prejudices and ways-of-belief about what humans are, how they should look and act?  

However, incidentally to self-interest no doubt, Dr. Zucker has filled his clinical coffers with pharmaceutical monies and brought parents to his offices with their reparable children for him to re-program. Now, given his economic interests, what sort of incentive does Dr. Zucker have in allowing any rendition of “Money” other than his own of taking the floor?

He shall rake in money and “prestige.”  Then it’s up to the critics to provide “proof” that his ideas are wrong. Critics who are not privy to whatever the machinations of his “chairmanship” of the “disorders of gender and sexuality” committee of the DSM-V and his mentor Ray Blanchard are cooking up with the “assistance” and expertise of Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Bailey who serve in “advisory” capacities to the committee. The committee’s work is closed except to members (Zucker, Blanchard and a few other psychiatrists who mainly work with other specialities) and their advisory selections.

One wonders now what pet theories of Zucker and Blanchard that have no empirical proof will be retained in the DSM-V and how much of a surprise it will be if they maintain their own interests at the expense of live human beings, otherwise known as “patients?”  

The re-programming agenda of Ken Zucker, the “proofs” of Ray Blanchard, occur in spite of the evidence that untreated gender-role non-conforming pre-adolescents have gender incongruity at very tiny rates in adulthood. You can ask my friend Zoe to find what the scientific protocol is for “burden-of-proof,” but I believe that the Zucker/Blanchard/Freund theory of transsexuality should have been accompanied by some “proof” prior to its encasement within the DSM-III. Now that it’s there doesn’t mean that it’s the “accepted way” of looking at transsexuality, especially in light of the growing body of scientific evidence that flies in the face of the thought-experiments of Blanchard and Zucker. Yet, the crusaders of the Zucker, Blanchard, Bailey group make the attempt to say their ideas have to be disproved, in spite of them never having been proven in the first place. Say what? 

Does this mean that any idea must be accepted as truth until complete scientific “proof” that the idea is false has been provided? In spite of the fact that the idea itself had never presented any scientific “proof” to support it? If this is the “science” of the “not real girls and boys crews” at CAMH and Northwestern then I am truly amazed that they seek to reverse whatever credibility psychology has accrued to itself in the West in the past hundred years. Isn’t the idea rather one like the “witch is made of wood” theory expressed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Thus, we come back to “real girls.”

I’m forever struck by the way we somehow irrationally manage to cop to the flimsiest appeals to our unreason: “That Obama-guy is gonna let the black-folk take over the government.” That doesn’t appear to be logical; yet, this election-season we have heard those views expressed quite openly by various people interviewed about their support for John McCain or their opposition to Barack Obama.

I would imagine that the idea is perfectly ludicrous for a number of reasons. But, I will also, as an aside to my point, ask this question: after 200+ years of having an overwhelmingly “white” list of political leaders, advisors, consultants, judges and cabinet members what would there be that was intrinsically wrong if Mr. Obama did only include persons of color, black people at that, in his administration? I don’t recall the hue and cry when white presidents made their entire entourage white. So what would be the ineffable evil in having all black members of Congress, or in an Executive Branch administration? (That’s an idea to simply think about and maybe consider for a later blog here.)

Aside from the constant drumbeat from some bloggers who apparently have a huge investment in being “real” while trying to “unrealize” others; aside from some rad-fems who fear their ideas will become useless if transsexuals are recognized as simply woman and men in the reverse-way the rad-fems think of us as being men and women at this point;  and aside from many neo-Freudian psychologists who have certain monetary, theological, and professional interests in maintaining the efficacy of thought experiments over biological researches; what is the problem if “real girls” and “real boys” have body configurations not in the norm for their groups? What exactly is lost? Or, as Helen Boyd has stated at en|Gender “transitioners, as I expected, are turning out to be the last tool in the feminist toolbox.”  

That would certainly tend to put paid to the fears of Mary Daly, Janice Raymond and Miss Andrea at Feminazi that the acceptance of transsexuality as a fact would somehow undermine all of feminist theory. (My! Who knew the existence of lil ole me could cause such a stir?) I would argue that it will only undermine certain deep prejudices by those authors and actually serve to revivify many feminist deconstructions of gender roles and stereotypes as being perfectly valid deconstructions. 

That Jillian Weiss and many others of us have discovered exactly the truth of what’s been described very much before as untrue or archaic can only reinforce the critiques of gender-discrimination in this country. There are actions performed here in USA that are so deeply embedded in folks that they are first nature. 

The question? Are transsexual women “real women?” Surely you’ve not read this far without knowing I am going to say, “yes, we are,” have you? 

I suppose you can best label my arguments as being “human-centered,” “connection-seeking” and “humane.” For in all of the various discussions about morality and truth, who is real, and who is delusional, I maintain that people are not delusional, not at base and not about what they know of their bodies and minds. As a therapist, how could I simply discount the thoughts, emotions and behavior of my clients as being “unreal?”

I suspect along with the British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, there are many human behaviors in our technological, categorically-structured modern world that elicit “delusional behaviors” as being perfectly rational ways of coping with anomie and alienation. Laing also stated this: The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. 

I find the words to be most constructive and also find them true. We fail to notice so very much research, ways-of-being-and-acting, and how true-to-life those are. We, the human community, not just members of the APA (psychiatric,) often fail to notice that we failed to notice events, people and processes that are beyond the ken of our religious, philosophical or scientific prejudices.

People are consistently, perhaps only, moved by their experiences in the world. When Laing’s “stone-age baby” meets the “modern-day mother” there is a lot that gets lost. Yet, as he also said, most of the time the interaction works well for both parties. We manage to live through our infancy and our early childhood.

As we grow older and live under the burden of our adult hopes, fears, accepted-wisdoms we often grow further alienated from anyone who might be “different.” We find that stone-age fear out-paces modern knowledge. We heighten our abilities to fail to see what we have failed to see and that we have failed to see either.  

In so doing we are often simply too ready to exile this or that group, this or that person, from what we presume to define as the sisterhood of humanity. — Yes, that’s contrived and meant for you to notice. — It’s not a ploy to prove my womanhood. Very simply, it was contrived to show you my point.

Many of you reacted interiorly to that phrase, sisterhood of humanity, didn’t you? There came a moment of cognitive dissonnace into your psyche, right? Even if it was a fleeting  moment, you noticed it now that I’ve mentioned it, right? So, we can actually notice what we fail to notice about ourselves if we can be honest and listen to another occasionally? I believe we have that capacity. 

We take our cues from the cues that have been structured within us. Dylan Thomas thought that within him there still lurked a Puritan-heart, placed there by his father, and that no matter his reaction, the Puritan-heart somehow nuanced his response either positively or negatively.

So with us all, I believe. We act and react based on deeply embedded conditioning. I hold fast in many ways to the fundamentalist perspective I was raised with. I reject that dogma, but find myself consistently having to compensate for the ways I have translated that fundamentalist-conditioning with the ways I argue and advocate for human equivalence: each one of us has the same importance in universe. I can be rather puritanical about that. I try to keep an eye on my own tendency to be my own sort of “true-believer.”

We claim, very rightly, to think. Yet, we hold fast to outdated and atavistically-engendered trajectories in our thoughts, in our ways of allowing or disallowing the world and other humans. We feel, as Caucasians in America, for instance, a profound discomfort when we are in predominately “minority” areas. We don’t enjoy the feeling of alienation, of being different, of standing out, and we may often feel, vaguely, that the sins of our forefathers will be revisited upon us when we are so caught-out.

Yet, statistically, there’s no need for the fear. Instead, most white-people should fear to be among “our kind” and most black people should fear to be among “their kind,” for that is where we see, again and again, that crime and violence enfolds us: when we are among “those we know or are like.”  

I have no doubt that in some Platonic World there are “real girls” and “real boys.” I also have no doubt that my life has no relationship, Plato notwithstanding, to that Platonic World of an ancient thinker’s thought-experiment. Instead my life takes place in what I shall call a Real World peopled with, and both affected and effected, by other real people, processes, events and objects.

Claiming to know Truth as presented in the Bible, the Koran, or in my experience and life has no more authority than would the claim of a quartz-crystal to know the entirety of existence, or the claim of a person who had attended six school grades or forms before leaving school forever to have a knowledge of education. Yet, I am always willing to assert that another’s life and thoughts are somehow delusional because they do not follow from attitudes and accepted belief that make me feel better about myself. 

Are transsexuals “real girls” and “real boys?” O yes. Just as we are all “real human beings.” Can we know truth? Most assuredly. Some truth comes to us through revelation, some through lived-experience and some through scientifically-accumulated research. I am willing to go way out on an unsteady limb and say that all of those areas contribute mightily to our various human knowledges. But the deepest knowledge available to any of us, to all of us, is simply that our different perspectives tend to be flawed by the things we fail to notice, and the failure to notice the things we fail to notice.

That’s the closest I can move toward defining in any particular way who is a “real woman” and who is a “real man,” who is a “real American” or who is a “real human being.” I can only make an unqualified and firm statement of fact about that last question.

Who is a “real human being?”

Why, every human being. C’est tres facile, n’est pas?

Categories: Connection, DSM-V, Feminism, Gender, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Otherness, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Social Relations, Theory/Reality, Transgender, Transsexing, Transsexuals, Witches, Women
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Real Girls, Part I: Reality and Delusion

October 23, 2008

Last night we stayed at home. There were no computers on. No one had a practice, no one was rushing to get to an appointment. Everyone was home by six and we enjoyed one another’s company. There’s something that quite wonderfully sets up when we are with family. It’s an atmosphere that partakes of coziness and laughter, shared ideas and it allows us to relax our cares, unwind the small sorrows or huge elations of a day.  

We had a marvelous baked chicken dinner with broccoli and cheese and we sat and talked, all three of us. Then we cleaned the kitchen and retired to the living-room to watch a dvd Catherine had rented a day or two before. 

In itself that was odd as we seldom rent dvds, mostly choosing to purchase them at Target or Wal-Mart. But Ian has been harrassing us for a couple of weeks, every time we pass the local Blockbuster, to rent “The Love Guru.” Over the weekend we broke down and stopped at Blockbuster and allowed him to check out a copy for the week. At the same time Catherine rented “Lars and the Real Girl.” We had liked the previews we’d seen of that in one of the cinemas where we had seen a movie. 

After three days of Ian getting his fill of Mike Meyers last night was the designated evening for “Lars and the Real Girl.” So we settled in on the couch and the loveseat and Jetta, the beagle/dobbie, after trying to snatch a place on both loveseat and couch, finally settled on the rug and we turned on the movie.

For those of you who haven’t watched the movie revolves around the life of Lars, a rather withdrawn young man who resides in a garage while his brother and (pregnant) sister-in-law reside in the family home. The sister-in-law has made it a mission to involve Lars in the “family.” But Lars does whatever’s necessary to maintain his solitude, hurrying home from work and going to church on Sundays all the while attempting to avoid the attention of his sister-in-law who’s concern is Lars lack of socialization.  

One day at work Lars talks, rather listens, with a co-worker talk about a Web offer to purchase a “real-life, true-to-life” girlfriend ( the blow-up variety.) Lars orders the doll and eventually she arrives at the garage. At this point Lars begins to dress-up and take a bit better care of himself. His brother and sister-in-law invite both Lars and his girlfriend, Bianca, to dinner, where they discover the reality of Lars’ situation. The brother is horrified and the sister-in-law amazed as Lars talks with Bianca, and continuously informs his family what she is saying.

The upshot of the event is that brother and sister-in-law make an appointment for Lars with the town doctor who also has a degree in psychology. A degree both justifiable and necessary, the doctor says, when one works that far north. With the instruction of the doctor and occasional interventions by her, Lars’ family and friends, most of the town-folk begin to involve Bianca in their lives. She became the glue that brought the town, and eventually Lars, into that very important social interaction and care we all long for. 

I’ll not render the entire movie as I think it’s well worth the two hours or so that it will take you to watch it yourself. I have to admit that I laughed (a lot) and cried (a lot) due to the film. I found it a deeply nuanced and tender story that presses the viewer toward answering the question, or at least pondering the question, what is real and how does it become so?

I found the film a perfect combination of “chick-flick” and psychological meditation, a thing not foreign to the viewing preferences of two therapists and their precocious son. I found myself deepely engaged almost immediately as I watched the drama unfold and the film has continued to engage me overnight and this morning as it’s brought me to think very deeply about “delusion” and “reality” and how we parse the spaces between the two. 

Not unusual, I suspect, for people caught in the borderlands of human being: transsexuals and transgendered folk, people diagnosed with mental illness and simply plain ole folks who go about their daily routines slicing this or that experience as representational of “illusion” or “realism.” The film exhibited a deft touch of both the director and the producer. The cinemantography was excellent, capturing so well the edges and the blurs of life in small-town, great northern American life.

Where do we draw our lines of “reality” and where do we draw, both as people and as psychologists and therapists, the borders of delusion? What allows us to make this or that person “delusional” and what makes another person “realistic?” Are the borders between the two states, the two definitions, permeable to the movement of one or another from one label to the other? And if so, what mechanism, what nunaces, what willing suspension of disbelief, requires that we re-think what are often felt by the majority of us to be firm and distinguishable boundaries?

The movie appears to lead in the direction of acceptance and love as the mechanisms by which unreality and reality blur. If one speaks long enough, interacts long enough, in the case of Lars’ brother with a plastic doll, plays along so to speak, the playing shades into a solid reality that becomes everyday and acceptable, so much so that when there arises the occasion for a funeral that one goes and even weeps for the loss that the bereaved feels, even feels his own loss at “the way things have become.”

Thus, does the entire population somehow become “delusional?” Or is reality simply based on our willingness or unwillingness to involve ourselves in the life of another, or many others? I find/have found that one’s involvement can make a difference.

For instance, in a fashion when I was an undergraduate Syrians were in many ways unreal to me. Their culture, their religious lives as foreign and unexamined by myself as would be the lives of denizens of a planet revolving around the star Sirius. One might have speculated and read the news of such people as their country played itself out on the evening news or in the papers, but as far as being real people, Syrians didn’t “really” exist for me. Until I met and eventually became close friends with Abdullah, an exchange student.

The to sit and exchange conversation, to learn that his family had many of the same ways as did my own; to learn that he had goals and desires, hopes and fears just as did I, I found the reality of Syria and Syrians became normalized for me. Suddenly it seemd to me that people who inhabited a small country on the other side of the planet attained a reality for me that I would have never thought possible six months before I met Abdullah.

I felt a loss when his sister was killed in an Israeli bombing raid. Yes, I know, I am sure the Israeli air force had very good reasons to bomb the house she lived in, or that the hit was a mistake as is often the case in modern warfare. But his loss, his sorrow to be so far from home when his sister was buried, his outrage that such a tremendously horrible event was perpetrated by another government became meaningful and outrageous to me as well. How dare they kill my friend’s sister?

I suspect that the same varieties of foreignness as I held about Syrians before I met and befriended Abdullah operate in all of our lives. Why else does it become so easy for us to dismiss those we hate as being somehow unworthy of our concern and compassion. How else explain our insistence on “principle” or “natural law” to the exclusion of compassion and empathy for another’s pain and plight? How easy it can become to imagine that this or that person embodies unworthiness of unreality.

On the other hand, as we get to know and relate ourselves to the lives of those who are foreign in some way to our own lives: union-organizers, hard-hats, stay-at-home-moms, drivers of SUVs (one of my favorite whipping posts) or postal workers, transsexuals, trangender people, Democrats or Texans; we somehow wish to disengage our acqauintance from “that group.” We become more and more willing to exclude our friend or acquaintance from fear and loathing. We reach that point that many white folk reached, or seemed to me to reach, in the sixties, in their dealings with African-Americans, “well there’s good uns and bad uns, just like everyone else.” 

I suppose that “good uns and bad uns” might be a useful way-station on the road to acceptance and understanding, although I doubt that its a very wholesome and embracing place to be. People come to acceptance of the foreign in stages. What’s ineffably “bad” slowly becomes what’s “acceptable” and “right.” It seems a bit much to expect that one wholly drops one’s opposition to another in one abrupt sea-change of acceptance and Bonhommie. Rather there’s a slow inching that may be quite difficult for the one inching their opinion, their ways of looking at the world, toward a willingness to embrace an accept. 

I suspect that knowledge is rather widespread among the leaders and movers of our various political and social parties. To take a position that in fact demonizes and makes another less-than me becomes a matter of simply divocing myself irrevocably from the “other.” That way, with no intimate knowledge, no interaction of any sort, with them I allow myself to believe and embrace the most most horribly reasons for them to be the way they are. The fact that they weep and laugh, blled and tear same as I doesn’t involve me with the difficulty of having to empathize in any way with their lives.

As a woman with a history of transsexing I find this pattern of much importance in my own life. It’s one of the reasons I generally don’t mention the fact that at one time I was designated “male.” There’s too much drama, too much delicacy required in the presence of those who do not know. I would rather simply be seen nd judged on the basis of being “Radha, my therapist” (another designation fraught with all sorts of fear and loathing,) or as “that woman next-door, what’s her name? She’s really nice and friendly.”

The “reality” then somehow turns and becomes normalized when one isn’t faced immediately with a knowledge that they will find it, perhaps, difficult to incorporate into their current views. That aspect of my life should wait, I think, until it becomes necessary to tell. It waits until they can realize me as one of them, another person attempting to live her life and make a living just as they do.

 

It’s this way that works for me as well. I have found it easy to conglomerate human beings into a precisely drawn area that I can label them and be done with any nuance that might be imposed on me by seeing something more than that they are members of a group I know nothing about. My friend Zythyra certainly encompasses that reality for me.

When I first started corresponding with her I felt she was someone whose life was distant from my own, whose experience couldn’t possibly have connection with my own. Yet, now, after a long while in corresponding and interacting I perceive a flesh-and-blood human whose borders range well within my own borders. She’s my friend, not some foreign admixture of experience and reality who I can never be like.

There came a point in “Lars and the Real Girl” that I was expectant of Bianca actually beginning to speak. I waited on her arms to move, for the plastic of her face to settle imperceptibly into flesh and blood, her chest to rise and fall with breath, just as my own does. Yet, the makers declined to make this movie that easy. Instead I had to become aware of Bianca’s breath. I had to form within myself and attachment to her life and that of Lars in such a way that the fact of her place among the other humanity of the small town became “real” to me. Then I could and did weep at her “death.” Then I could find within my own heart the devastation of Lars at the loss of one he held dear for the healing she had brought to him and I could laugh empathetically at the prospect of his acceptance into the realm of love building between himself and a “real girl.”

Reality is what we make it. That’s the reason, I suspect, that we, at least unconciously, attempt to hold the “other” at more than arm’s-length. For at more than arm’s length the other can be seen readily as a demon, as a foreigner not privileged to hold a place in our reality as another human being whose life breathes the same air and whose body takes the same food as does our own.

In distance there is safety for all of the fever-dreams of danger and evil we allow ourselves. In closeness and relationship the “other” transforms herself into a friend, a normal human being who has AIDS or breast-cancer, who works hard to maintain her life, the lives of her children. We begin, so very imperceptibly to allow her into our lives where she’s no longer feared or degraded. She’s no longer a plastic doll dressed and made to speak by another’s volition. Instead she becomes sister, friend, perhaps, even lover.

 

All blog photos by Catherine Wetzell, (c) 2007-2008

Yesterday I linked to another blog as a way of getting to a point I was trying to make. The blog owner felt I had mis-read what was written and that I had held them up to ridicule. That was certainly not my intention. 

I have removed all links and the blog owner’s comment I had approved and my comment back to them lest anyone find the blog and relate what they do to my making fun or in any way finding that blog objectionable or “unreal.”

I am making a public apology to Sara for offending her. I truly meant no disrespect to her and her struggles to see her own way through her life with what I am certain are the same pains and struggles that I have had to find ways through in my own life.

I very much respect her points of view and find them in no way outlandish or worthy in any way of disrespect or laughter.

I made a mistake and have done the best I know to do to correct it. I hope this public apology removes the sting at least somewhat to her feelings and her efficacy as a writer, and as another person with a difficulty that involves transgender issues.

I wish for her the very best results in her life, her work and I wish for her great happiness and satisfaction in all areas of her life. — Radha Smith

Categories: Connection, Fear, Friendship, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Love, Men, Otherness, Psychology, Relationship, Transgender, Transsexuals, Women
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Comments: Comments Off on Real Girls, Part I: Reality and Delusion

The Importance of Being Earnest: Transition and Life

October 22, 2008

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.

Categories: Christine Daniels, De-Transition, Gender, Mental Health, Mike Penner, Psychology, Therapy, Transgender, Transsexing, Transsexuality, Transsexuals
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To Discuss or To Hold? Transsexuality in a Cissexual Society

October 21, 2008

I’ve been having a very interesting and useful, at least for me, discussion over the past few days with another woman with a transsexed history. The discussion has revolved around transphobia and the various ways we, as women with transsexed histories cope with and internalize various aspects of ourselves in our quests to erase from memory, sometimes, or to reify, sometimes, the very real and deeply-hurtful ways in which we have had to struggle with who we are. How do we cope internally with a world that holds a default position of “completeness” for the individual from the time of birth through to death? 

I don’t, as a note, mean to exclude men with transsexing histories from my discussion. They may well have among themselves similar discussions. The fact is, I simply don’t know. I only know that which has affected me and what has affected others I have talked with, interacted with and experienced some of the same things with. So, this discussion might well apply to men as well. But, if it does, they must be the ones to tell their particular experiences.

I meet and have met very many women who simply have been fortunate, or even less than fortunate, in their transitions in terms of that very Western and capitalistic notion of “beauty.” They have surgeries that re-mould their faces, their breasts, their hips and tummies. They conclude their electrolysis and finally have their confirmatory surgery and simply desire to go their own way, disappear into what we often appear to think is a “real life.”

They get married sometimes, or find life-partnership with another woman, transsexed or cissexed, and go about  their respective lives never ever bringing up the places they have been or the struggles they experienced to get there. They, quite understandably, never wish again to discuss or revisit life prior to their surgeries. It’s understandable simply because the trip is usually filled with pain and the deeply embedded notion that to be “whole” one must be like “any other woman.” 

It’s not that memory disappears or that in most cases (I can think of one major exception) they absolutely deny that they have transsexed. Instead it’s simply a matter of holding that fact in abeyance. They struggle alone and silently with whatever unexamined pain and demons they have and “thank you kindly” have no desire to draw from themselves a rendition of “The Way We Were.” They would rather deal with the way they are and leave their pasts in the past. 

It’s an understandable reaction simply because who really wishes to deal with whatever they have found traumatic? Do those of us who have been raped or sexually abused truly wish to call up those memories, no matter what value another might derive from them? How often would one wish to recount the scenes of a rather damaging car-wreck she’d experienced and lived through? Wouldn’t it be better just to allow the memory to sink wherever old and horrid memories sink? 

That was all in the past and no longer defines my life. If that is so, why does it still arise? As a therapist that would be my one question. “If you are so adamant that none of that any longer applies to you, then why do you despair of people understanding that you are now simply you?” Or, is there yet a piece of unfinished business directly in the middle of your most hidden and intimate heart that causes you to wonder why others cannot believe that all is well with you? 

For, you see, that is another thing I see among many of my sisters. A desire to forget and go on with life as they are now, but a draw to go, at some point, back into the discussion areas of bulletin boards. A desire, as stated, to “help” others who may be just now beginning their journeys through transition with experiences of having been there, done that. Healers must have been wounded so it is said. But, shouldn’t we ask, has the wound healed or is it festering just beneath the surface of the skin? 

Part of my discussion with my letter-discussant has revolved around “what do we hold and if we don’t hold it how do we protect ourselves and our sisters from various levels of radical feminists who desire nothing more than to find ways and arguments to discount the fact that we are women as well?” Well, that’s certainly one nub of a problem. Another is the unrelenting wish to divide people into categories by the Neo-Freudians who basically believe that we are all men anyway: simply either ueber-homosexuals or side-tracked heterosexual males. 

How does one sail the ship of self between the Scylla and Charybdis of Neo-Freudian theorizing and Radical Feminist exclusion without hoving up on the clashing rocks of the strait, in the maw of the whirlpool or devoured utterly by the ravenous and long-necked mouths that would consume us? How indeed.

Perhaps there are no safe ways through such a pass. Perhaps it might be better to simply go silently to a different port that didn’t require one to pass through that strait and risk psychic life and limb to reach a calm haven. Of course, that leaves rocks, whirlpool and dragon exactly where they are for following sailors to avoid or brave as they choose. Some things simply cannot be changed, eh?

Or is there another way, a turning way that risks the exposure of both the monsters of the deep and the clashing rocks of the strait for what they are: dangers invented to stop what cannot be believed, or stopped because the stories and the experiences violate some deeply-held political, psychological or cultural definitions that yield simplicity at the cost of the innate complexity of human experience?

My personal choice is the latter, as those of you who’ve read me will understand. My friend Robin, the transsexed friend, not the cissexed one, queried me once when I said I didn’t wish to be an activist: “Are you so certain of that? Because what I see is a strong pull in that direction.”  The answer is, like most of our life-answers to things a bit more complex than simply a yes or a no, there are nuances and shadowed tones to my answer to that question.

What I want to do is to work with women who’ve experienced trauma and/or addictions, women and men with mental health problems and with both men and women who transsex. It’s there in the realms of assistance and self-discovery that my passion and my desire lie. But do I wish to march and perform civil-disobedience? No. Do I want to be on Larry King or Oprah? No. Why?

Simply because such venues leave out the nuance, the discovery and depth that a series of therapy-room discussions can bring forth in both the so-called patient and in the so-called therapist. I enjoy the attempt to find one’s self as best one may. Television and radio formats don’t allow for that often enough. Their time constraints and the desire to make something that is easily repeated as cliche or ancient-wisdom tend to reduce the complex to some trite expression that allows us to think we know a thing that’s complex beyond simple understanding: like the human heart.

I admire the attempts of Julia Serano, Zoe Brain, Andrea James, Calpernia Addams, Lynn Conway, Lisa Harney, and Jennifer Boylan, among many others, to place before the public a new note about women and men with transsexing histories. Their efforts have proven invaluable, as they do, indeed, give people reason to pause and take re-stock of the ways they believe things to be.

Those women show in their lives that one’s prejudices and false beliefs may require re-working and a second or third re-working in order for the believer to actually grasp some of the complexity and wonder involved with our Universe. Perhaps, some of our own, transsexed women’s thoughts and expectations, require re-working as well. 

Thus, my conversation with someone whom I have a growing respect for leads me exactly to an impasse at this point. Do I discuss common themes I see that seem to lead transsexed women back to the places where we must hide ourselves away and where we live in the hope that no one will find out? Do we discuss things amongst ourselves like the definite existence within our own ranks of class-privilege and the basic fact that person’s of color are under-represented on our bulletin boards, in our discussion circles? Do we discuss how our notions of “successful transition” generally involve having the money and the stature to have the proper surgeries and then require us to hold back any generosity from sisters who work the street or who are involved in the porno-trade or in escorting as though they are less-than for keeping body and soul together in the best fashion they can? 

I believe those discussions to be necessary. Should they be held openly and on the Web because to do so might give Bailey or Raymond some avenue of attack that they can then say “well see, that’s exactly what I am talking about, transsexing is a matter of effeminate males trying to reach some political and social acceptance for their expression. This isn’t real.” 

Perhaps those words, those dismissals, will be used. But, as things stand now, they are being used any way. There is no escaping from those who would make us less-than, who would deny the power and the efficacy of The Feminine as being just as powerful, just as worthy, as The Masculine. For, as one reaches into the depths of what both Radical Feminists and Neo-Freudians postulate at bottom, for now, it is that heightened sense that somehow the expression of Femininity is to be shunned and dismissed. 

Could there be reason that neither of those two groups study much or write about much the very evident hesitation to regard males with transsexing histories in their ardent battles to find “real reasons” for the expression of females with transsexing histories? Could it be that there are very powerful and important questions and bases that our opponents, both feminists and psychologists, desire to remain beneath the threshold of consciousness. Is it possible that to bring those forth, to embrace women with transsexing histories, would require of them that our opponents and detractors actually examine themselves and the reasons that underpin their arguments? 

Again I shall answer affirmatively. It’s so much easier to extract a mote or beam from my opponent’s eye than it is to examine the log jutting from my own eye. Thus, I would ask that my sisters and brothers be willing to discuss amongst ourselves our own privileges and our own prejudices and fears, the ways we have been and continue to be shaped. But I would also ask that we together examine the bases of fear of desire that underpin and gird our opponents. That we take the discussion to them and open our own discussions so that we might stand the chance of helping those most in need of assistance: our own kind and those who dismiss and revile us who have been and are a part of us for they know the intimacy and the pain of transsexing themselves. 

These are not easy choices to make and some will most definitely refuse to open themselves to what they perceive as only hurtful and demeaning experiences they had expected long ago to never have to pass through again. 

It’s a very typically human reaction to pain and trauma: to hold it, bury it, for fear that opening one’s self to it will re-enact the pain over and over again. Yet, what we do know from a psychological point-of-view is that opening the heart, opening the mind, opening our narratives to pain and trauma somehow manages to relieve it, allows it to pass out of us. While we also know that pressing it ever tighter into our souls cause damage and increased pain that in time overcomes the soul’s ability to cope with the effects of that trauma, that pain, until one explodes at least in a figurative fashion.

Counter-intuitively we discover that openness and revelation decrease the pressure that one person intensifies within herself by hiding the pain and lonliness, the dismissal and the very real and honest expressions of her own struggles to be whole, to be valid and to be “real.” The only cavaet I would add is that the release must not be an uncontrolled and universal release, for that way lies madness as well. Rather quiet discussion, an expression of what is there, but not all that is there all at once.

The soul is a fragile yet powerful part of us. Both it’s closings and it’s openings can damage us beyond what we would believe is possible and unleash a terrible and fearful onslaught against others about us. The quiet room, the secret confessor (something the Church has known for centuries,) can often be a healthy way to begin the healing. 

The pathway from lonliness and madness rests firmly on the ground of human contact, of allowing what is hidden to become evident to self and to at least one other. That way is the way of relationship, of health in a world that practically demands that we withdraw ever more tightly into shells and hideaways for fear of being devastated. 

Instead, freedom and ease beckon through relationship and the worthy narrative passed through and out of the soul to others who can hear because their narratives are so very much like my own. 

 

All blog photographs by Catherine Wetzell, (c) 2007-2008.

Categories: Activism, Connection, Feminism, Intersectionality, Otherness, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Therapy, Transgender, Transphobia, Transsexuals
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Comments: 6 Comments

More Things In Heaven and Earth: Retooling Our Thinking

October 16, 2008

A day or two ago, a Canadian blogger posted this piece at The Cracked Crystal Ball II. In her essay MgS opined rather succinctly about some of the more virulent writings of Miss Andrea at Feminazi at Word Press, the links are included in MgS’s essay. In the process MgS also lined-up the so-called Blanchard/Bailey HSTS/AGPTS (homosexual transsexual/autogynephilic transsexual) theories in her sights. She, very rightly in my opinion, deconstructed both the radical-feminist and the psychologically-based ideas about transsexuality.

She does not say that the positions taken by those two camps are signs of lazy thinking and an unwillingness to better define their bases to be inclusive of a segment of the population of the planet rather than simply dismissing that segment as being too small and too arcane to be included in our universal explanations for human behavior and human existence. I shall. It seems to me that such a position is exactly the one taken by both the Rad-Fems (beginning with Janice Raymond and Mary Daly and running on to Julie Blindel and to a great extent to Judith Butler) and the Neo-Freudians as represented by Ray Blanchard and his mentor Kurt Freund.

MgS’s thesis can and should, it seems to me, be read. It’s a worthy and thoughtful piece that strikes a chord of sanity while losing nothing in concision and elegance. She has encapsulated a good deal of rational argument into a very small space.   

Theories and political positions should not become sacred in such a fashion that blithe dismissal of exceptions or that adjustments shouldn’t be made in them for the sake of actually getting to the truth. When we strive to do that we find great injustice and great mistakes walk hand-in-hand through our social and political frameworks.

Science and theory, politics and economics, are not closed books. Brain sex, for instance, may not be kindly incorporated in either Dr. Blanchard’s studies of gender-conguence or in the postulations of political theorists. The fact that someone who appears to be female may have a deeply biological brain structure that inclines or demands of him that he be a male or that the same thing might be true conversely is not an occurrence that should be dismissed as being a lie nor should it not be taken into account when one forms her or his theory of why an occurrence simply is what it is.  

A political argument such as mAndrea consistently makes: this undermines the bases of Feminism, shouldn’t be taken at face-value and an entire group of human beings be alienated and exiled from the validity of their existence simply because their existence poses an opportunity to do some hard work to re-adjust pet ideas and political stances. We see the effects of such actions as those have long-lasting and thorny effects for generations, centuries, as evidenced by the troublesome on-going existence of racism and classism in our own political and psychological hierarchies of validity.

The simple fact that I should have to go back to my study and re-write my earlier works when some uncomfortable fact brings down the structure of my pet and cherished ideas doesn’t trump the reality that I need to be as accurate as possible if I am going to dabble in the game of explaining Life, the Universe, and Everything.

In making an integral vision of our world we must always be aware, I think, that human being is a communal property. People bleed and heal, get sick, die, find elation and joy, sorrow and struggle whomever they might be. To ignore or dismiss a group, a person, simply because I believe it easier to dismiss them than to include them and to re-work my notion of how existence unfolds and how human possibility can be best realized is plainly lazy and self-aggrandizing. 

If we are to be the arbiters of what is real and what is a lie our bases should be broad enough to include and uphold the existences of those who confound our easily assumed prejudices. We must be willing to spread our thought, our research, to include even the most difficult conundrums the lacunae in knowledge and possibility bring to our attention. 

Again, apply Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Categories: Feminism, Gender, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Kyriarchy, Men, Psychology, Theory, Transsexuals, Women
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