To A T

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Portia, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1, 184-187

Goddess, I do so hate to advertise for those who seem filled with loathing for others, themselves, or, mayhap, both self and others. It seems to me I’d be better to skip the chance to share with you exactly where I find the vitriol and how it might affect me. I feel that way regardless of whether someone is friend or seeming foe. Matters not. Therefore, no links to any of it. No matter who published it.

One way or the other I find that something the American scene isn’t lacking at this time is most assuredly no-holds-barred, down-in-the-gutter evisceration. Most particularly not lacking evisceration that deals not a whit with ideas and actions, rather prejudice, hatred and the intentionally untruthful personal attack.

I’m sure you each have some experience of that, unless, of course, you’ve been camping along the banks of Idaho’s Selway River in the wilderness set-aside there for the past five or six years. My presumption is that if you’re reading this on the Netz, which you obviously are, then you’ve read those eviscerations aplenty, in fact, read them as far as the experience of humans runneth not to the contrary.

For someone with my background, ya know the “trans-thang” and all, it’s almost against the odds that I wouldn’t have read such eviscerations if I have ever read a trans-blog, been on a trans-bulletin board, list-serve or in a trans-chatroom. Hell, it’s what is done, most especially, in my experience, among the distaff side of the transsexual gender divide.

Ok, that was an overly flowery way of saying that “women with transsexual histories,” trans-women, “women of operative history” (apologies to those of you females who’ve had a gall-bladder, uterus, fallopian tubes, cervix, breast/s, appendix, or tonsils removed, that’s not the operative history that those who use the terminology mean, I think,) or however one has a desire to label their past do numbers on one another, nastily, on a regular basis.

I mean down and dirty, withering as an eight-year long Saharan dust-storm,  real yo-mamma piss-fights. Usually folk come to those fights pre-equipped with knives and machetes so there’s no need to pause to get a weapon. Most of the weapons tend to be blunt due, perhaps, to the fact that almost none of the participants actually know one another, or care to do so I imagine. All the best cuts tend to be blunt and jagged, requiring a few hundred stitches and major surgery to heal again. Hence, no doubt, the “operative history” meme.

As well, no one running across such a fight should engage in it at peril of being besmirched grandly by the shithouse sludge that generally is tossed about like snowballs in a schoolyard during a blizzard before the children have gone home.

I’ve yet to see much of anything ensue from such fights than each “side” becoming more and more entrenched in the notion that their interlocutors are fools who refuse to hear the dulcet tones of truth being rained on them by the sharp-tongued harridans they are interlocuting with. (Yeah, that ain’t no word, least warn’t till jes now.)

Each “side” returns home and regales one another with what utter morons are those they just finished bashing around. No piece of ground ever seems too small and insignificant to defend with another’s life. It recalls very succinctly some Army commander in Afghanistan holding a hill until every soldier in his command is dead, although the hill itself has no strategic, or even any tactical, significance.

Enough of such reading leads one to proclaim with Macbeth in Dunsinane,

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Well said, Sweet Will, tis as though ye’d been to some of those places on the Netz yourself.

For, with any actual analytical assessment a being from a Jovian moon might wonder why and how something less than .05% of the population of the everywhere thinks they will manage to effect a political coup to the current patchwork legal system of USA through dividing somewhere close to the middle and having an all-out knife-wielding Bennie and the Jets go at one another.

There’ll be blood in the streets, blood on the tracks, blood down the storm drains and whomever survives the gang fight will most assuredly be arrested for murder and get to spend, dependant on in which state she happens to be arrested, most or the rest of her life in a male correctional facility or in a female correctional facility.

Methinks it’s hardly worth the candle. You say təˈmɑːtoʊ, I say təˈmeɪtoʊ, let’s call the whole thing off.

The description of such events is best, again, given by The Bard:

Macbeth: What is that noise? Seyton: It is the cry of women, my good lord.

Yup, that it is, the cry of women who would rather be dead, perhaps, than to see thersels as ithers sees em. Or who would rather slash and burn than accept even the barest inkling that perhaps there are more things alike about them all than there are differences to die for.

Of course the good queen (Lady Mac,) Hereafter, has died. Alas, but strictly predictable to those of Will’s time. The heart steeped in blood, envy, and hatred can find nothing but death. Those hearts die, eaten, forsooth, from inside out like worm-eaten apples on trees.

For that’s the rub, isn’t it? To fill myself with vitriol, envy, blood-hatred, loathing and murderous intent is to become what I fill myself with. To eat poisoned fruit is to become … poisoned.

So we, people that is. There’s no particular, separate, personal hell for women and men who have, will be, or are transsexing. The truth for one of us is that same truth that holds sway for all upon the place beneath. We bring our deaths upon ourselves as surely as we bring a pair of slacks upon our legs. The fight within a group merely weakens the group itself. The collective bond broken is the breaking of the entirety. “Look to yourself, the devil is loose,” to quote Philippe Auguste.

Indeed.

Most excellent advice. It’s just so Galt-like, Ayn Randian. Yep, just adolescent, angsty, I-am-the-collossus-who-prevails-because-I-am better, pre-rational emoting that we manage to persevere in throughout lifetimes. We do so love to imagine that our individual truths rise to the level of universal imperatives.

Hmmm, not so much. I’ll be better to bet on the collective, I imagine, harsh as that may sound to American ears.

Of course, the entire conceit was a means of getting me here, to my own life.

Today I spoke with a friend, someone with whom I shared some years together at work. We chatted about the possibility of our current institutions forming a sort of alliance to facilitate various of our graduates becoming peer counselors at places they haven’t themselves been attending groups for the past 2 to 4 years. The thought there is that their not being so well known at the places they’d be working would help the candidates in facilitating groups. Familiarity can be a negative inducement to those who would rather not investigate their own foibles when they know another’s all too well.

During the course of that conversation I inquired about another person who worked at her institution. He’d once been my supervisor and a confidante when I was pursuing transition at work.

When my transition became known to the powers-that-were, the supervisor helped not a whit, or, at least didn’t make the whit evident if he did help a whit. Upshot was that I left carrying with me a sense of being hung out to dry and having garnered no support from someone I’d trusted and admired.

He, I’d heard, rose from supervisor to program director and then to director. Yet, in the course of my conversation today I became aware that he was still at the location, but had been demoted back to program director.

Hell, I should have danced over his professional comeuppance, after all, he’s done me wrong back in the day. Right?

I discovered something about myself during that conversation. I discovered that I felt badly for the man. I knew that the relegation had to have been difficult for him. I knew it had to have cost him a blow to his self-esteem and possibly in the way that others looked at him. At the least he must have felt the insecurity of how he imagined others might have looked at the event.

I felt badly for him. I was sorry that he had the experience he had. I wished that his fall, so to speak, had never come about. There was no pleasure in discovering that he’d been knocked down a step, or a flight of steps.

Instead I felt a sorrow for him. I thought he was better proud and rising than he was brought lower. I imagine, that perhaps the institution itself would be better off had he remained as director. I’d very much like to believe that, anyhow.

It struck me then, as I looked to myself, that there are times we simply must, if we can, not give ourselves over to a revenge completed. Such a dish is better not served than even served cold. For to eat of the dish at all is to lose a portion of the self that this woman can ill afford to lose, I think.

His demotion hasn’t affected a single thing about my work life. It hasn’t gotten me rehired there, nor ever will. They do not want there a woman with a transsexual past. Or if they might, they don’t want me. Yet, someone I thought of as friend and mentor has been raked by something I feel he never should have had to experience. Although, perhaps the upshot will be that the clientele will be better off with him where he is. He was always good with the clientele.

I know now something about myself, another unforeseen blessing of that news. I know that for me to forgive another is possible, no matter what the slight, or how bad I perceive the betrayal. After awhile it doesn’t matter anymore. The fact remained that he was another human being, another person who could and did feel and in feeling could hurt. That hurts me as well, his pain, or the fact he probably felt it at that time of demotion.

What was in him that I admired is, no doubt, still there. I doubt he has lost his ability to assist others in helping themselves be better than they were eight months before. I seriously doubt he’s lost his ability to inspire and to grant compassion to those less fortunate than he. I’m sure he hasn’t lost his ability to teach others and serve as an example of a good therapist, father and man. He is what he always was, someone who was important in my life. I feel badly if he felt badly or was hurt.

Some of you who’ve read this string of essays know I’m fond of the truth that the crux of human existence, contentment, and health is positive connection and relationship with other human beings. You’ve seen me more than once quote in these pages the Meditation 17 by John Donne. “…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and never send therefore to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

So it does. Shall always do so. I am by myself rather insignificant. No matter my personal strength I can be brought low on a whim, slain or hurt to the depths of my heart. It’s only with others and through the agencies of others that I can commune, grow, and discover the fullness of my heart and soul.

I can be a woman or man of “multi-operational history” and it will matter not to those who find all such women and men, known and unknown, abominations and spawn of the devils, or merely find us deranged and very mentally ill. The difference is one of intensity of the dismissal, not that the dismissal itself is lacking. They will not change their minds or relent in their desire to expunge the world of every last one of us just because I hide my tracks, or suppose that I am in some way “truer” than a woman or man who has lived life differently from me, whose circumstances make it impossible to have an operation, or three, or who decide for any other reason not to be just like me.

Naw, those folk will still be trying to use their divining-rods to discover who is “real” and who is “fake” (and make no mistake, for them that means who was born with what sex organ and, ipso facto, is a man or woman, real man and real women. No amount of scientific evidence or political argument will be likely to change what they think they “know.” There’s a lot of research that backs me up in that thought. People who “know” something seldom change their minds, in fact, they tend to become more adamant in holding their emotionally charged belief the more you show them (scientifically, logically, or in any other fashion) that they are mistaken. It’s the way we seem to roll. An emotionally strong belief isn’t normally changed with evidence; it tends to be strengthened with evidence to the contrary in fact.

So those of you who want to cite Pat Robertson or Ayatollah Khomeini and believe that you’ll be safe as well from Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, the American Family Association, and the other assorted members of those tribes, go ahead and believe that. I suspect that when your belief meets their belief that you’ll discover that your belief was mistaken.

Perhaps, the answers to our fights, arguments and revenges are simply to “look to yourself.” Find there who you are and accept that perhaps no one else will find you so. Then, if you’re not seeing the same way as they are seeing, perhaps learning a bit more about yourself will not result in agreement, but perhaps it will result in your leaving the down and dirty fight for more peaceful and personally satisfying pursuits.

The only winning argument for diversity of experience and opinion is the overwhelmingly vast existence of just that: overwhelming diversity. If there is one binding truth that holds it all together all the time it’s yet to be found. Better to leave off the fighting, the eviscerations, find one’s heart and one’s personal qualities. Live those as best you can. Learn to live them together, cooperatively. That’s the only way you’re going to find what you want, acceptance and to be left reasonably alone to lead, if you can, a contented life.