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Sexual Objectification and Women Born Transsexual: Finding a Common Language and Learning To Speak Together

December 21, 2011

I will warn you before you being to get into the meat of this that it could tweak places in your psyche that will leave you feeling angry, or hurt. Some might feel that I am supporting their views, or standing beside their cause, when I am not. Others might feel that I am disparaging their views, or themselves, when that is certainly not my intention.

But, there I was this morning on that inevitable, it seems, “social network,” Facebook, when I began to look at some pictures posted by a “facebook friend” (this one I know actually, or at least knew, as an embodied acquaintance some time ago.) The pictures were of a party held in a public place. There were a lot of people there.

The party seemed to have a Christmas shindig kinda atmosphere, from the pics, and everyone was dressed fairly formally. It was definitely not a sweatshirt and jeans sort of affair.

A number of the female participants, the pictures were mostly of females, not males, were dressed in some remarkably revealing and short skirted dresses. Just absolutely gorgeous outfits were on display. The group of people seemed very festive. The party appeared to have been at a bar.

I’m intentionally setting a stage and am intentionally hesitant to wade into the deeper end of the pool I am trying to examine. I hesitate, because there are perfectly lovely people who may read this who will believe that I look down on them, I am almost certain of that.

Then I also hesitate because there are certain characters that might also read this and somehow imagine that I have changed my mind and now hew a course more closely aligned with their own political brand.

The truth is rather more complex. (Isn’t it always?) Brief and partisan “takes” are generally not quite so encompassingly valid as we would imagine when our emotions are tweaked. The truth is that through the years I have changed my mind a couple of times about the following subject matter. This particular post isn’t a change of mind; it’s an examination of something I hadn’t consciously noticed. It is an essay about something I’ve noticed and had a sort of visceral reaction to. But, as the reaction has been visceral, I have, of course, not examined it in any depth. I have merely felt it.

[A brief aside, my partner and I discussed feeling and examining this morning over breakfast in terms of practitioner resistance to dialectical-behavioral therapy vis-à-vis client interactions. One cannot continue to talk in opprobrious terminology: “splitting, attachment, borderline” while working with clients who have been so-designated. Why? Because the language one thinks she knows and can “handle” is merely a group of code-words that tack on alleged qualities that do not describe behavior, or even feeling, unless it is the feeling of the therapist herself that’s described by the absence of any sort of clear description. In other words, I can label you a sociopath or a fetishist, but those words tend to show my own prejudices and when I use them they mayn’t relate at all to what you may be talking about while using the same words. Human communication is a dicey game indeed.]

Aside, aside, I’m ready to continue. The party appeared to be one that had a number of transgender people were in attendance. How could I tell? Well, how could you tell? Just accept that I know what I saw, alright? Now, it wasn’t easy to winnow further and “know” whether there were transsexuals and cross-dressers and the so-called genetic women among the party-goers. (Oops, that word almost led to another aside about, Nell, the 1994 Jodie Foster vehicle!)

Anyway, I realized that I was having some sort of reaction. It wasn’t a horrified one, or a dismissive one. It was simply a reaction to some of the dress and some of the motions that I saw in the pictures. Then, I also knew that many of the participants had gotten drunk and that added to the reaction.

Some of you are prolly already aware of the reaction I am about to describe. Hell, you may be having it yourself as you read. The reaction was something like “Damn! Don’t they know how unsafe it is to get drunk and go back out dressed like that? Think of what might occur!”

Ah-ha. Wait for it, I’m getting there.

Preface: I have, on occasion worn skirts that show off what have been a really nice set of legs. I know, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful!” 1980s, Pantene, Kelly LeBrock: But, how many of us went right out and tried the shampoo and conditioner and still use it, perhaps? Memes are effective, aren’t they? But there is also this fact, anytime I decide to show off some leg I also have this alarm that sounds within me. Actually, two alarms.

Alarm one is: “damn, girl, is that going to be safe to wear?” Alarm two is related but slightly different, “Is this more of the reaction to rape syndrome you struggled so hard to get past?” sigh And here we begin to descend into the matter at hand.

My reaction to the pictures was something like: it must be nice to not have to consider the reaction of men to your dresses.

The second was more like, well, perhaps that’s just the reason, men don’t notice such things. They will dress in ways that do attract attention, do attract those who might not otherwise incline themselves to attraction to that person. In other words, this is just a bunch of men dressing up like women. BAM

There it was. It rose up, that resentment and the “they’re really men” meme. And, perhaps, most of those in those pics would agree that they are men. Crossdressers are not the same as women, right? I think most of them would agree that that’s prolly true. But, they and I both also agree that they are fully human and deserving of every consideration I grant to other human beings.

Of course the rub comes when people who’ve been dysphoric for decades inside of bodies they do not want and don’t feel comfortable with look at those pics and react in some fashion like: “they’re not like me, they’re disgusting and need to be alienated from transsexuals because they will queer the pitch for us.” There are many women born transsexual who would have such a reaction. Yep, I’ve had it as well.

I have both embraced the separatist ideals and have rejected them as well. But, I also have that reaction when I see what I see. And it does strike me very deeply as being exactly what many movement feminists from the 60s and 70s have called it: a sexualization of women’s bodies by men.

But, were it simply that simple, then I’d hardly need to write an essay and try to work out for myself what was and is going on. I think this isn’t as simple as separatist of any sort and Prince-followers on either side are willing to try to make it.

Humanity finds it easy to make wars. Most of us don’t want to work hard enough to make peace. Prolly why divorce rates remain high among heterosexuals and relationships are so hard to come by for many of us. The work can be excruciating. Hence, it’s much easier for Mary Daly to have made hateful statements about a group of women she never took time to know, than it would have been for her to actually get to know transsexuals and crossdressers. Hence, it’s easier for some transsexuals to dismiss crossdressers than it would be for people to work at relationship. (yes, I know, “years ago I was betrayed by crossdressers, transgenders, men, whatever and I will never put myself in that position again.” I respect that, but since your reaction is PTSD-related: the trauma of those betrayals such that you continue to live them, perhaps you could speak with a therapist about working through this ideation?

It’s not that the event was imaginary, or that it didn’t hurt me. The problem was that for years I relived those hours in my mind and acted as if, many times, they were still occurring. Working them out with a therapist wasn’t a sign that I was insane. It was a sign that I was willing to get better and take more charge of my life and who I am. Those are good things, not shameful ones.

Perhaps, there is a more simple answer and perhaps it’s already “out there.” Perhaps we haven’t looked at all deeply into the answer.

Perhaps the answer is, indeed, that it’s a much easier thing for men to sexualize women than it is for women to sexualize our selves. Perhaps the millennia of patriarchal oppression and training have given us a wariness of our own sexual selves.

Perhaps, being “taught” by means of sexual assault or rape of children have made sexualization of one’s self a frightening prospect and to view those who don’t seem to know the dangers is to have a deep and lasting resentment rise inside of one’s self. And just maybe I resent the fuck outta the men who wanna dress in femme garb and flaunt their sexual selves and lead others to think that women are just as fearfully sexual as church fathers and lineages of rabbis have said!

Perhaps, when I can remove the clothing, or remove the light voice or remove the perfume and make-up and the next morning dress in a white shirt, a pin-striped suit, a tie and shoes and then splash on Old Spice and meet the guys at the gym after work. Well, perhaps it IS easier for me to forget just how dangerous it seems to have dressed as a woman the night before and worn a very sexy outfit.

There is resentment. Isn’t there? I can feel it. “Why can’t I?” “Why should I live in trepidation and you don’t have to?” “Doncha know that dress could lead to rape?” — Even among those of us who know better, it becomes so easy to blame the fact of sexual assault on the way a woman dresses, eh? –That training runs deep, doesn’t it? How long is that train you’re trying to brake? That makes a difference in stopping times, doesn’t it?

Layers and layers to uncover and many of us don’t take the time to analyze, to find vocabulary that describes behavior that we can observe and come to some agreement that we can share a common vocabulary. Instead too many of us are involved with sharing our feelings, our reactions, our PTSD with others. Thus, the conversation never gets started because we are at the Tower of Babel and we’re all speaking in different tongues.

I think that if women can embrace our sexuality that would be a very good thing. Instead we have millennia of training and repression that say things like “she brought that on herself.” Did you see what se was wearing.” “How could she get that loaded?” Recriminate, fulminate, enrage.

Those are the contents of too many of our conversations, too many of our attempts to communicate are attempts to communicate instead an incoherent rage and anger at experiences. I understand that, quite well.

I have felt the alienation and rejection of transitioning from the outward appearance of one sex to the outward appearance of my own sex. I have felt the horror, the self-condemnation of the aftermath of rape. I have felt the demeaning sense of having my mouth shut for me by others. I have felt the fear of when will a beating stop and the fear that the next minute would see my death. Those feelings are basically beyond quantification and observation and rational expression while I am enmeshed with them.

When such feelings rule my quotidian existence I cannot conceive of any idea or behavioral expression that might not place me back into fear of immediate death. It’s only when I come to a place where I realize that I may or may not die in the next moment, but I will not die of a rape that isn’t happening any longer. 
 Then I become more able to find a common language with another.

But that language will not come about through fear mongering about the never before occurred becoming commonplace, nor will it come about through belaboring the obvious: “you are not like me.” It comes only when I see the obvious with the fear of death.

Au contraire, Radha, you are human and so am I. I bleed; you bleed. You desire connection; I desire connection. Perhaps we can attempt to make connection with each other? Perhaps we can, indeed.

But first, we must find a language we can all speak and dismiss the notion that I can somehow quantify the person you are by labeling you in ways that are demeaning and painful and dismissive. None of that behavior makes my point. It only leads to more alienation.

I’ve had that a-plenty in my life. I’d rather not continue to build walls that keep me away from others. The first step for me is learning to be authentic and to demolish the poses I wish to replace the poses I lived before. Blessed be.

Categories: Authenticity, Connection, Conversation, Feminism, Language, Psyche, Relationship, Transgender, Transsexuals, Women and Men
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Comments: 7 Comments

The Quality of Mercy

August 20, 2010

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 təˈmeÉȘtoʊ, 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.

Categories: A Life, Connection, Harry Benjamin Syndrome, Relationship, Social Relations, Transgender, Transsexuals
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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

Easy to Get Angry, or Just Impassioned: Hard to Tell the Difference Sometimes!

January 5, 2009

Ah, the holidays have been a lark. Catherine’s been home for a week. Seems as if we have finally gotten to renew our knowledges of one another. Ian, quite kindly cooperated by desiring to visit the other family in New Jersey immediately following Christmas. After he returned on New Year’s Eve the three of us spent the rest of the week cleaning and preparing ourselves and our house for our post-New Year’s party which, by 11 p.m. on Saturday was ended successfully.

Everything was even cleaned up. Who knew that two hours before there had been 25 or so adults and six children between the ages of one and eleven eating, laughing, talking, drinking, meeting and generally appearing to enjoy themselves. (Yep, even the children! Hardly any cries and complaints at all from the kids. The Wii may have assisted that.)

I suppose the truly amazing thing was that our apartment was totally chock-full of friends and loved ones. Only about two thirds or so of the invited guests were able to attend! And even at that count moving about was a difficult prospect — and yes, the kitchen, as usual at such affairs, seemed to be the place everyone wanted to be most often!

What is it about kitchens that  seem to invite conversation and conviviality? Luckily there are two entrances to ours. This made it possible to press about the edges and occasionally circulate the traffic to the living-room and the adjacent dining-room. That way almost everyone had a shot or two at standing in the kitchen for conversation. Thank goodness, none of the conversations regarded gender or sex that I was privy to. No biology and certainly not the cultural-construct of gender. It may have been a backdrop, but it wasn’t a loud and obnoxious one. (This is fore-shadowing, just so ya know!)  

The popularity of kitchens? My personal take is that all of the best conversation takes place in the kitchen. I suspect it’s a cultural heritage for many of us. Our ancestors had large hearths very often in their otherwise small indoor living spaces. Not only was the kitchen the focus of the food, but also of the warmth at a midwinter gathering. We learned to converse and be convivial in what are now our kitchens. Although it is easier to gather in a kitchen that has some size, it never seems to matter at a party. No matter how small the kitchen, the party goers, as many as can cram themselves into them, seem to manage trips to the kitchen. 

There was a certain perfection to this set of holidays. The boys and Catherine and I had a visitor-free Yule-tide. Just the four of us to exchange presents and discover what Santa Klaus had brought. It was quiet and loving and the next day the boys were off to New Jersey for most of a week. That left time for the partners to discover one another prior to the advent of the two-day mad rush to clean, primp and otherwise prepare the house in order to minimize embarrassment due to the gathering of friends. 

They came, they saw, they ate and they learned a bit about one another. A good time appeared to be had by all. Yesterday was the decompression. The time when, in a best-of-all-possible-worlds, I’d have time to write this blog and Aubrey would have slept until 2 p.m. (O, he did!) Catherine would have caught up her reading and Ian would have had both the computer, the Wii and the DVD player to himself as well as being able to roam about his neighborhood with his new trick bike. (O, he did as well, all of the above!)

Catherine and I joined the congregants at the Unitarian-Universalist Church nearby for the Sunday after New Year’s service. We returned home where Ian was still engrossed in the computer and Aubrey was still soundly sleeping in his room. Catherine and I made us all some lunch (Aubrey missed it) and then she and I read or did the Facebook thang on Blackberry and computer while Ian went trick bike adventuring and Aubrey finally arose and started the end of his day.

Everything was fine until early this morning I discovered that a response I had made on a website forum had been badly disliked by another individual on the forum. O damn! Look what a fine mess you’ve caused again, Radha!

This time it was entirely unexpected and entirely unintentional. But, given the tenor of earlier posts I suppose I should have used this vaunted intuition of mine to at least have heeded the signs that something of the sort might be in the offing. It wasn’t a total telegraph, but there were signs, which like the Fool in the tarot-deck I ignored. Ya know? The card where the traveler is blithely stepping off the edge of a cliff unaware of where their steps have led them.

Of course, I have thought for a long time now that perhaps the Fool is no fool at all. That he, instead, can see a path across the abyss that isn’t visible to those who use merely regular sensory experience to judge their footsteps. Perhaps like Indiana Jones in that Last Crusade movie (I think that was the one, so long now since seeing any of those movies I am unsure) where the path is there, simply cleverly disguised as a chasm without a bridge!

At any rate, wouldn’t you know, I had quite inadvertently stepped on the toes of one of the more ardent supporters of what we in the formerly transsexual, now HBS-women, niche of humanity, call the HBS Movement. I use the caps advisedly. Just as I would use the caps for Religious Right Movement, or the LTBG Movement or the Civil Rights Movement. For, you see, there is little humor and almost a fanatic adherence among the HBS Movement. On the other hand the idea of HBS (Harry Benjamin Syndrome) is quite inviting.

Harry Benjamin Syndrome is the brainchild of women with transsexual histories (I don’t meet men of transsexual histories who belong to it although I imagine there are a few at any rate who do.) who quite legitimately and rightly want to provide support to the fact, yes, fact, that there is a growing and quite convincing body of scientific evidence basically saying those of us with histories of transsexing have brain differences that cause or at the very least incline us toward that mis-described life “trapped” in a body that doesn’t match the make-up of our brains. 

Beginning with the Zhou research that was first published in 1994 there have been a number of scientifically biological, anatomical, and neurological studies that indicate that transsexuals have the brain make-ups of the sex we say we are rather than the brains of the sex we embody. Male and female spectrum transsexuals have been shown to have these interesting quirks that suddenly have indicated that we are not men or women “trapped” in the wrong bodies nor are we hyper-feminine homosexual men or the ever-denigrated autogynephiles born in the fires of reaction from the psychiatrists and psychologists at Toronto’s Centre for Mental Health and Addictions (CAMH.) Instead we are pretty much exactly whom we have said we are. Some of us are women and some of us are men in spite of what seem to be the indications our embodied selves give to General Practioners and Obstetrician/Gynocologists. 

To tell the truth, go read the writings of Kelley Winters or Zoe Brain and find out  from truly adept scientific minds what it all means. I am a therapist and a poet. I’ll only garble and overly simplifiy the real scientific bases that have been found since the inaugral paper by Zhou, et. al. that began a new way of looking at transsexuality. 

Back to HBS and the Movement. Like any movement, even scientific ones, there’s a deep admixture of politics, social status and  even economic status involved in the “Movement.” There are also overtones of an aversion to being seen as in any way mentally-ill, although certainly long and deeply hurtful rejections of the self  of an emotional, physical or sexual nature can lead many down the pathways of depression, anxiety, loss or lack of development of self-esteem, PTSD, and other mental/emotional problems. Bottom line is pretty much what a 2001 report by Dr. Dawn Banks concludes: 

It means that in the largest study that I know of that investigated the scores of transsexuals on the MMPI – a reasonably well respected measure of psychological functioning – transsexuals, as a group, are not crazy.

Does that mean that no transsexuals are crazy?  Not at all.  Mostly, it means that being transsexual doesn’t imply that you’re crazy.  It is still quite possible for a transsexual to be crazy on his or her own merits, but that’s quite independent of the whole issue of transsexualism.

So, in that respect the HBS Movement is on solid ground. On the basis of the scientific proofs and indications arriving from UCLA, Prince Henry Institute in Australia, the Free University of Amsterdam, Goettingen University and researchers at centers of learning in Sweden and Denmark in a rather steady stream over the past few years (this is where you go to the Brain-blog and the Winters-blog) the Movement is also on very solid ground. 

So where, Radha, does the problem lie? Glad you asked, being more of a polemicist who likes to try and support some of her polemic with a bit of evidence, this is where, if I am gonna do so, I will shine. The problem is that the Movement refuses among it’s most out-spoken and virulent supporters to recognize a couple of facts it apparently finds inconvenient truths. 

One of those facts appears to me best stated thus: someone else’s struggle to obtain recognition as human beings who have every right to expect to be treated as valuable citizens without taint implied or perpetrated by the ways they dress or how they feel about gender binaries and other such culturally-constructed ideas and practices do not in any way demean, ruin, cast a bad light on, or in any way say or cause any damned thing about me or you to be a fact. 

The thing is, when I put forth an argumentative justification for my dislike of particular groups, in this case the so-called transgender folk, in this fashion: “BUT I will not accept that mine should be drowned so they can have theirs.”  Then I have left behind all scientific basis for anything I say. The “but” linguistically, as every child knows, means that everything that came before is hereby excluded from my argument as being not true. Thus, the arguers who use that “but” when they extol the virtues of allowing people to live and let live deny the very thing they seem to have argued for. “But” is a very powerful word. The HBS Movement is full of “buts.” And full of those who refuse to own that their “buts” are actually atavistic and reactive prejudices, not scientific facts. 

“But my validity will not be called into question by their existences.”  “I have provided lots of monetary, social and emotional support for such folks, but I draw the line at allowing them to denigrate my gender.” Yep, and there comes the HBS-rub. This “movement” is not about sex: as in there are two sexes, male and female, female and male. The movement also is about gender: the socio-cultural constructs built around and over the sexes by eons of human existence and traditions. 

The proponents of the virulent forms of HBS wanna have science and culture all rolled up into one tidy ball where they can say I behave the way I do because of my sex, but I am also desirous of being able to conform to the gendering people give me within the context of my culture and traditions. And there the “buts” begin to flow swiftly and with fury. There the socio-economic realities raise their pretty little heads. Because that is also the point that such items as “an uncompromising pursuit of major surgery on face, genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics like breasts, hips, vocal chords, etc” is also a marker for HBS. 

Such an uncompromising pursuit is quite fine for those who have had or have the monetary wherewithal to sustain the drive. Of course it doesn’t usually stop there either. Generally speaking the way someone earns their money also appears to have a dog in this fight. Sex workers almost by definition cannot be HBS. They are somehow inimical to the way HBS-women (sorry, I keep using women because … well, because I have yet to meet a virulent HBS guy! They appear to be, like hippogriffs or unicorns, fabulous beasts that are spoken of but are never seen in life. Perhaps they were all too well socialized as girls in their gendering and simply are there to be seen and not heard.)  I dunno, here is where I go to strictly interpretation of others behaviors with nothing to go on except how they behave and what they say. There are, no doubt other interpretations that will be at least as rational. I just never seem to be fortunate enough to be presented with them. *sigh* 

Thus, I blithely made a statement yesterday about the possibility (I think it remote at best, but find that what has not yet been found cannot be excluded as possibility) that maybe at least some varieties of “transgender” folk may have some biological connections as well. Bad move. For that little gem I get dumped on with a fury that would have done a piney-woods evangelist in the heartland of Alabama, Tennessee or Mississippi proud. “Gal, you’re going to Hell for that kind of heresy!” 

Seems that the possibility by itself is enough to ignite the “scientifically” righteous to a fever pitch! So, given that, let’s get down to things I have observed in over fifty years of living on the planet. One is folks drape what we wish to be true, often enough, with the cloak of scientific “proof.” That seems to grant us a dispensation that we are often not willing to have shared by others. 

Two, access to hormones, surgeries, etc are definitely economically based in countries where medicine is pay-as-you-go. In other countries where government picks up the tab there are usually huge waits for a “non-essential” set of surgeries and procedures. If you have the economic wherewithal, however; you are allowed to opt to pay as you go elsewhere. Period. Thus, those little addenda of the Movement about surgeries are, prime facie, socio-cultural. As are those that denigrate sex-worker transsexuals for making money to afford exactly what the HBS Movement requires they be able to afford. They have simply chosen a way to pay for their surgeries and changes that is one of those “ewww” thangs among the basically white, European-cultured, middle to upper-class social strata.  

Three, a fanatic aversion to all things connected to, in any way, mental health. I can understand the reactions to being pathologized by psychiatrists and psychologists whose main concern has historically been to uphold the social fabric and the “accepted truth” rather than to validate the individual in spite of social norms. Hell, I’ve experienced that and, no, it doesn’t feel good. But, then to turn around and glorify the possibility that those self-same denigrators of myself are going to now denigrate others with something like “I just want to see what they’re going to do in 2012 when the DSM/SOC are revised & they’re labeled as “fetishists” tsk tsk tsk.”  

Sorry girls, that’s just not going to fly either. You wish to actively show your own validity and have the nasty shrinks who’ve demeaned you for years to now fetishize everyone you are averse to? Is there some science here I am missing? Or is there simply atavistic and irrational dislike and a sediment of low self-esteeem that clings to formerly transsexual, now HBS-Movement, women? 

I know the tropes. I have seen and heard them used before. I have heard white folks talk about allowing people of color to use the same toilets as themselves to be the onset of raging syphillis and gonorrhea brought on by the transmittal of germs through toilet seats! Puh-leez. I have read the comments of train commuters of the 1890s and early 1900s about the negative health and well-being that would result from the Pennsylvania Railroad allowing just anyone to wait in the great hall while their trains arrived rather than quarantining them away from good upstanding middle class white folks. 

I am not seeing much of a difference once I start dealing with “the HBS Movement” rather than the science that is being made by non-HBS people. 

Does this piss me off? Well, yeah, it does. Who’s included? Who’s excluded? That doesn’t seem to be in any way a function of science. Instead it’s a definite function of socio-cultural elitism, middle class angst over being part of “the best and brightest” and sediment from feeling denigrated and now being able to find a whipping folk to denigrate myself. 

A newly found copacetic aquaintance sent me this yesterday “I think you’re very brave and better reasoned than I’ll ever let myself  be to beard the Scientist, but thank you Ma’am for your essays into those hypothetical woods.”

The problem with Movements is that they are not scientific. Movements involve politics, economics, cultural biases, social positioning and in the case of the HBS Movement, what ultimately seems to me to reek of the former Boys Club that found in transitioning they were no longer in the Club, nor allowed to be. So now, they have done the only thing left them. In the name of science they have formed a new boys club, for transsexually-historied women. Ok, that’s the controversial part. The part where I call ’em as I see ’em.

You want the scientific and the gendered culture all rolled into one nice ball where you can be accepted? Accept that: get over the conditioning you got years ago and somehow made you think you were worthy of being special. The boys club closed on us all long ago. Why would you want a new one? 

As long as you try to have both biology and cultural imperative you are gonna wind-up with “movements” that will almost always partake of and adhere to lowest common denominator fear and loathing. Accept the science and be at peace. You are real. You are a woman. You are worthy. 

But, please, do work on the cultural stuff. Gender isn’t a necessary construct. It’s an old one that has it’s uses and certainly has a ton of momentum. In many ways most of us find it comfortable for ourselves. But that some folk do not and wish to “break the binary?” Well, more power to them. I’m not sure how their doing so is going to wash me away in some horrific flood and make me irrelevant and invalid. In fact, I don’t believe that if the gender rules and contructs all collapsed today on a playground in South-Central Los Angeles that I would notice even a tremor. I would be willing to bet that tomorrow the sun will still rise and set, and that sex will continue to exist as a biological fact. 

The sex-differences among all humans still allow that each one of us has about a 99.7% similarity to every other human being. 0.3% is not a lot of difference in any case, is it? Why can’t we relax the rhetoric and the antipathy and just go about finding the comfort that comes from actually recognizing the importance of others and their worth? Why must I adhere somehow to  formulae that invariably set up “Goddesses of Reason” and places guillotines at the edges of their plinths for the ones we fear and loathe? 

Come along, Maximilien, shall we stroll together to the Place de la Revolution and watch the enemies of the Convention gather their just desserts? Perhaps you can purchase me a carnation for my bonnet? Afterall, it is the 1st of Thermidor! 

 

______________________

Addendum:

For at least one person’s experience of the “HBS Movement” and her experince of it I’m gonna add a link to Laura’s. She runs, or ran, haven’t checked in a while to see if it’s still an active site, a TS forum and support site. 

She did the Yahoo groups thang and got a rude awakening apparently. 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Connection, Gender, Harry Benjamin Syndrome, Sex, Transgender, Transsexuals
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Update On TDOR and LTBG Support

November 27, 2008

A few days ago I wrote a blog about the frustration and anger of a friend whose local Pride organization managed to schedule a board meeting (there are transgender-folk on the board) on Day of Remembrance.

Yesterday my friend sent me the following letter which I have taken the liberty of reprinting here. All locations and names are either removed or changed or in other ways disguised because they are not the issue here. 

My friend, I believe, has done a great job of both making her points and raising awareness among allies of a few of the items that might fall under answers to LBG questions about: “What Does The T Want?”

Freud nothwithstanding, she has succeeded, I think, to start an important conversation. The man with whom she’s begun that conversation also earns a lot of credit in my estimation because he’s listening and open to making changes that will accomodate not only lesbian, bisexual and gay members of LGBT and their concerns, but also the concerns of us troublesome transgender representatives. 

It seems a remarkably sane and wonderful approach toward helping us all better work with one another for stronger organizations and more respectful and caring accomodations for each other. Now, if HRC could just begin to understand this, then something huge might really start to take place. 

See why I love her? 🙂 

 

I got an e-mail saying the meeting for Pride Council was moved about 35 miles closer to me, just over the mountains and down into the valley a bit. Then, later I got a notice that said no one from the north of the county was going to make it so we could have the meeting in my town. That was good. 

I got to Pride Center about a half hour early, 6AM, caught the Director in his office. He was busy but turned away from his computer to talk with me. We closed the door.

I gave him a copy of your e-mail with your advanced blog entry in it. We talked for the half hour before the PC meeting. I told him that once he had heard what was going on, realized he blew the date even though I had given him adequate notice, he should have blown off the board meeting and showed up. He could have still made his meeting, albeit a little late. 

He was apologetic and he pledged to do what he could to remedy this. I told him that I had thought about it in depth. I told him that I wanted his promise that next year I would have the full support of Pride on November 20 for TDOR.

I told him we don’t really need a lot of resources just support, people to stand with us and hold the day as a solemn remembrance. No media, circus events, no grand-standing, little publicity so as to protect identities of those mourning, those sensitive about their identities. No fund-raising, no co-opting the ideas that TDOR is founded on such as HRC tried to pull in some locations.

I would be glad to participate in a “trans-awareness day” if one was to be planned, but not on the 20th of November. If that is in store look at Fall, maybe make it part of PRIDE events. But keep the TDOR as a holy day of remembrance.

I also told him that I would make sure he gets a feed of info from me with the events that are T-related I am aware of. I told him that I would mark my calendar for a time in September 2009 to be sure to start getting some awareness with the organization of the approaching TDOR. He said he would make sure there was Pride presence at the next one and not ignore us.

I sent him a quick follow up e-mail with your BLOG site and Vanessa Edwards Foster’s. She had a piece that addressed the HRC’s attempt to co-opt TDOR with a pollyanna idea with a posi- spin and upbeat attitude, put on a happy face for our dead.

I told him it is not just showing up. How you do it counts as well. 

He’s is a sweetheart. I hate to scold him. But it was important that we talk. He knows Radha Smith now. 

Thanks for your help. 

I hope your weekend this Thanksgiving is blessed and shared in love.

 

Yes, may that be true for us all. 

 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone; and I hope to return Monday. — Radha

Categories: Activism, Communicating, Connection, Ground Work, Hearts and Minds, Inclusion, LGBT, Social Relations, Transgender, Transsexuals
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Deconstructing Gender: Diversity and Exclusion

October 31, 2008

The weekend has arrived, or will at about 1:30 p.m. today. Catherine and I are going to a wedding in Massachusetts. Not our own, the wedding of a very good friend with whom we both once worked. She quit work a few years ago to go to Massachusetts in order to gather a Master’s degree and now works on a PhD in Sports Psychology. 

A couple of years prior to her stopping work she met the love of her life, a man who enjoys very often the wearing of “women’s” clothing. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what that means. The range of human couture and fashion being such that if he wears a pair of slacks and a sweater, what makes it, exactly, a “women’s” pair of slacks and sweater. If he wears a scarf, what makes it a “women’s” scarf? 

Does the notion that the clothes might be bought in a department of Nordstrom that’s labelled “women’s” make all of the clothing there female? What if he’s bought the same items at Old Navy? Unlabelled would the clothes then become “androgynous?”

I think we all have this tendency to “gender” pretty much everything in our world: our bodies, our clothing, our habits of action or inaction, our animals, our trees, flowers, the very ground of Earth and the moon, stars and Sun. I cannot think, just this moment, what gender clouds and watches, necklaces, gourds, wreaths and penicillin happen to be. Perhaps some reader would be kind enough to let me know. A note would be fine, please just try not to show forth your disdain when you inform me. I sometimes have this space in my brain that shows itself when I consider gender and gendering.

Just grant me, please. some slack and, if you are truly generous, some slacks: 12P, in a hunter-green, if you don’t mind. Thank you. O, I suppose you’d better be sure to purchase them in a “women’s” department. I wouldn’t want you “deconstructing my gender” by purchasing the slacks at Old Navy or in a “men’s department.”

Gender stands, or perhaps sits, as an invisible, and also constantly visible, aspect of our lives. We cannot walk the street, attend the cinema or theater, ride a trolley or buy a gallon of milk at the grocery or convenience-store without someone, maybe everyone, gendering us. Often I think it’s very much akin to being “racialized” or, in the case of those with a mixed ethnic heritage, being wondered about racially. Just gotta place that label as an easy pathway to defining the person we don’t know, never will meet, or sit with across the dining-room table from.

When my son walks at his school to the bathroom, he’s ueber-sure to walk into “The Boys.” To do otherwise would be a huge social and, perhaps, even a moral, mistake for him that would haunt and embarrass him. This is a child who has been at the vortex of gender since he was three. He’s a child who struggles with the idea of “explaining” his three moms. I listened from the window yesterday as he attempted to nibble at the edges of that with his friend who lives two doors away, blissfully ignorant of Ian’s parental history.

He’s leery of his friends having the knowledge of his parental background as his previous experience of “telling all” didn’t work out particularly well for him. Thus, when he came in I suggested that he either not mention the fact of his parentage or allow, as the other child did, people to think their own thoughts and come to their own conclusions about how he gets three moms. The human mind, doncha know, fills it’s own vacuums. The guess proffered by his friend was complicated and didn’t include sex-changes as a means of explanation. It did include lesbianism. 

Of course that’s the other major concern of people: identifing the sexuality of a person. Neither Catherine nor I walk about with that ominous “lesbian” tattooed on our foreheads, sorry, that sort of tattoo is definitely not on the cards for us. But we watch, in our peaceful little village, the daily routines of “gendering.”

The way men will glance behind them when they hear steps to the rear at the WaWa and make a decision about holding open the door or allowing their pursuer to catch up and go first into the store. At the food-market when one pushes a full cart toward her car there are the occasional offers of help to push the cart to the car by the bag-boys or to do the same and load the car from the occasional man in the parking lot. “No thank you, I can manage, but that was really sweet of you to offer.” 

I’m simply not certain at all that one’s gender can be deconstructed, anymore than one’s humanity can be deconstructed. Our human-kind have lived so long socially with that distinction that it occurs to me that no matter how valiantly feminists of all-stripes make the attempt, no matter how acceptable androgyny or “cross-dressing” become that we’ll probably “label” people as what we perceive to be there.

A male or female “cross-dresser” or androgyne will be “identified” as the gender they appear to be, for the most part. Thus, my friend’s spouse-to-shortly-be will be seen as either “a man wearing women’s clothing” or as “a woman” when he garbs himself in the fashion of the Nordstrom “women’s department” and walks or jogs into the world outside his door. My friend, quite readily, identifies him as “male.” She’s not a lesbian, but neither is she prone to making some invidious comparison because of his “cross-dressing.” She loves him and over the past five or six years has deepened her feelings for him regardless of what he wears or how he’s perceived by others. 

I would imagine that his neighbors, not one of whom I have ever met — our friends come this way, we haven’t yet met them at their home in the three years they’ve lived in Massachusetts — probably just say or think, the guys down-the-street or the-guy-next door and his wife, lover, roommate, whatever. 

Thus, this idea: “I have no problem with someone deconstructing their own gender but the minute they try to do it to mine

.bang,” seems a bit overblown and a rather useless preoccupation to me. People will or will not de-construct my gender. I am more than well-aware of the fact they do not “de-construct” it without my giving them some idea of where I have come through my life. They apparently do not find me inhabituel or dissonant. 

 I believe it is with most of us: women or men, whatever our provenance. We are gendered by others and they pass along without any particular desire or imperative to “de-contruct” a damned thing about us. They simply notice, make that 2-second evaluation unconsciously, and go about their lives. The deeply embedded ability to “gender” seems so deeply embedded that most of us simply do not give it a conscious thought. We just do it like good little Nike mavens. 

Thus, to feel I am somehow beset by a group, or a world, of people who are busily de-constructing my gender simply doesn’t rise very high on my list of “things to worry about.” Until someone requires me to think about it, I don’t. OK, I’m a lax theoretical feminist I suppose. I’ll never go deeply, I imagine, into the matter like Judith Butler.  

Yet, here I go to a friend’s wedding who would be termed a “cross-dresser” by others. I have friends who are androgynous, female-spectrum and male-spectrum and who take much pleasure in simply being “hard-to-define.” It gives them comfort. It’s the way they choose to pass among the rest of us in this world. Do they enjoy the possibility that others wonder about them when they meet or pass each other on a road or street? Is there some kick they get from this?  Are they deconstructing my gender for me? I haven’t experienced that as being so.

Is there simply the matter that they feel somehow more complete when they are not easily defined, or defined one way and then another? I don’t know. Nor do I truly care. What I care about are their hearts and the way they touch me and I touch them. That seems to me to be the crux of any matter that pertains to ethnicity, gender-appearance, racial definition or political and religious identification. 

They do not diminsh me by their comfort. They quite enhance me through my inter-relatedness with them. Nor, have I yet while walking and talking with them publicly been somehow deconstructed by another as “not-woman” or “cross-dresser.” Thus, when it comes right down to the nub, I believe something far more surface-connected is at work among those who perceive a threat to their gendering by those who don’t fit neatly into our gendering social mores. 

It seems to me that there is much smoke, but not from fire in any way. The smoke is a product of wishing to hold a political or social principle that has been made from the whole cloth of our imaginative selves. We perceive threats to our validity or some wholesale search by the people we interact with for a deeper-text in our persons, in our comfort with being ourselves, simply because our imaginations and fears run unabated toward the Nightmare. 

I find the effort and the imagination to be rather unimportant, a figment that resembles a fever-dream that takes us in the night and frightens us. For our waking-realities are much differently lived than are our nightmares, no? Yet all-too-often we allow those nightmarish imaginings to guide the ways we live waking. As my thorny friend Lisa opined in yesterday’s comments: Most (people) live in dreams that never materialize but make for great inner movies that tug the emotions.

I find her take to be exactly the truth of my own reality, although I am not the “big picture” person she is. I am concerned with those little details of personality and fever-dreams of destruction and invalidity. For they affect, in the absolute most unusual and forceful ways, the big-picture we strive to make whole.

Fear and the wholesale adherence to to an “identity” that partakes of political, religious, theoretical ideology seldom seems either a rational or a compassionate and embracing way to travel to me. I suppose that is one reason that I claim to be a “feminist” with a small ‘f’ and concern myself more with moving into relationship and mutual interaction with others. Do I wish we could all do that more often in our lives. O, yes, it seems to me that we and they, the other, would be much more comfortable were we able to slough-off the ideological in favor of the relational imperative in our dealings with others. 

We make gods and goddesses in our own images, in our own ideological viewpoints, rather than in the azure air and the breathing wind, the fertile earth:

And in thy mind beauty,

                                         O, Artemis.

As to sin, they invented it, — eh?

                                               to implement domination

eh” largely.

                   There remains grumpiness,

                    malvagita

Sea, over roofs, but still the sea and the headland.

And in every woman, somewhere in the snarl is a tenderness.

                                                          A blue light under stars.

The ruined orchards, trees rotting, Empty frames at Limone.  

And for a little magnanimity somewhere,

And to know the share from the charge

                                         (scala altrui)  

God’s eye art ‘ou, do not surrender perception. 

                                                                              — Ezra Pound, Canto CXIII 

In our politics and our social concerns we surrender perception all of the time. We make dreams reality and tremble in the darkness of our own fears and imaginations. We define others as The Beast and avoid looking very deeply inside ourselves to check simply what is from what we loathe and harry without cause or reason. 

There’s a larger umbrella at work in our lives than Republican or Democrat, male or female, African or East Asian or European that we ignore to our peril. The larger umbrella is our own shared and vital humanity, the ability we have, as even the fearful realize on occasion, to mix and meld and feel the joy of interaction with those who believe differently yet bleed the same red-blood, cry the same briny tears and harbor the same desire for relational congress with other human beings. How trite and basically evil our small umbrellas can become: ways of allowing another to stand exposed to the rain and elements while we remain dry and sheltered. 

So, we will go now, you and I, Catherine, and witness a marriage between two people we love. We’ll laugh with them and meet new people we have never met before and feel the warm intersection of lives and habits, color and texture that is always the very basis of our lives. 

Our truest Goddesses do not arise in our minds. If we allow Them, they arise from the world outside us, granting us nature, urban, suburban and rural. That we strive to parse them like we parse sentences is to our great diminshment. As we view them whole and complete we see within them ourselves and all of those others: human, animal, vegetable and mineral who inhabit this universe, caught in Indra’s Net. 

I hope to write again on Tuesday, after we return from Massachusetts. But, you are, of course, allowed to read what’s already here in the meantime.

Have, all of you, a wonderful weekend and may Mother bless you and hold you always, as She does.

Categories: Connection, Daily Life, Feminism, Gender, Inclusion, Relational-Cultural Theory, Relationship, Transgender, Transsexuals, 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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States of Grace

October 20, 2008

Saturday night turned out to be special regardless the disappointments of the day that had preceded it. 

Our son’s other mother, my ex, had spent a good potion of her Friday in a doctor’s office and then at the emergency room of the Princeton Hospital after having chest pains while she was at work. This past weekend was one in which Ian and his bother were supposed to spend together in New Jersey. 

Due to the medical emergency: she was treated, tested for hours and eventually released with no signs of a heart ailment being involved; Ian spent Friday evening and most of Saturday with his other two moms. O, well, regardless best-laid plans for an evening at the art galleries in Philly and perhaps dancing at Sisters, instead we eventually had dinner out and spent an hour and one-half at Barnes and Noble with Ian while updating ourselves as much as we could on the medical emergency in New Jersey. 

The night was far from a waste or a disappointment as we ate Italian, Ian’s favorite — pasta-makers of the world be warned: there’s a 10-year old child in southeastern Pennsylvania who aims to single-handedly keep you in business for at least one more generation. Catherine and I bought our holiday-season cards, maybe this year we can get them actually sent to our friends and familes prior to December 25th. Catherine purchased a book and a tote and I obtained the newest Patricia McKillip novel, The Bell at Sealey Head.

All in all it was a nice, if unexpected, Friday night together. Ian’s mom and grandmother were to pick him up and head to Jersey after the 2:15 football match of the Bears (Yay!) and the Wolverines (boo!) at the park just across the railroad aqueduct from our home. The match was hardly a match as it turned out. After they had played the first game, weeks ago, closely, the Wolverines (boo!) drubbed our over-achieving Bears who had just held the two best teams in the league to one-point victories on consecutive Saturdays.

But, Ian didn’t seem too much disheartened. He’d played his left-guard position as well as he could, making blocks and maintaining an upbeat attitude. I suppose that is the one thing I have found most enjoyable about watching my son risk life and limb playing football this season. Unlike many of the driven boys he always stays upbeat about his team.

They haven’t won much, one game I think, but most of their games they’ve been competitive in although this drubbing had me concerned a bit about how Ian would take it. Afterwards he wasn’t quite as overjoyed as he was the week they won when he declared: “I feel like the king of the world,” but neither did he display the high-dudgeon I’ve seen other boys display after losses.

He exhibited what team-mom, Jonie, had repeated to me last week about her admiration for my son, “He’s always willing to play or sit for the good of the team and he never grumbles about going both ways or how tired he is. He’s always upbeat and always has praise for his teammates regardless of how they are playing. He’s just a super-kid.” Why of course, Jonie! He’s our son.

As it turned out Catherine and I were left, by 4:30, with our former weekend plans tattered and flying to the stiff breeze like the sails of a defeated sloop in an eighteenth century naval engagement, adrift and ready for the kill. We referenced a few “thing-to-do” on the computer and decided, in a kind of acquiesance, to go to the “Concerts at the Crossing” venue just upriver.

Neither of us had ever heard or seen either Caroline Herring or Eilen Jewell before so the choice was one that in some ways was a resignation. (I’ve been jonesing to frolic along the Tappan Zee for weeks, especially knowing the Fall colors were coming in nicely and I really wanted to have spent Saturday in Sleepy Hollow, Peekskill or Croton-on-Hudson. We got there on Sunday, but that’s another blog.) A concert at the Unitarian Church in Titusville, New Jersey featuring two performers we had never heard seemd a poor second best to a day of roaming followed by a nice dinner.

Thus, dinner was accomplished at the diner/restaurant just down the street followed by a vanilla latte at Starbucks and then the short drive to the church where we arrived a few minutes before Caroline Herring took the stage. Within minutes she had me enraptured. Her southern twang recalled to me home and the first twenty-five years of my life lived in Tennessee and Alabama.

Her songs were deft lyrics, incorporating phrases like joie de vive and je ne sais quoi  (nope that’s not usual in many songwriters/performers of folk music,) and her voice and playing were absolutely perfect in the wonderful acoustically-built church auditorium. She sang about her grandmother, Susan Smith and Korean missionary women, States of Grace (click the link and play, sorry it’s not a quieter venue) that absolutely brought a number of vectors together in my heart and mind.

There is something in that song that resonantes within me. Don’t we all live in states of grace? We do our best to attempt to live lives that will cohere with the great world all about us. We make attempts to fit in and to reach some happy equilibrium of peace and harmony with what and who are about us while attempting to equalize within ourselves the strivings and desires of the heart.

Perhaps for a women with a transsexed history the song might be particularly poignant. For our states of grace are not allowed without a huge fight, often enough. There are huge segments of people: Neo-Freudian psychiatrists and psychologists, Radical Feminists, preachers and believers, homophobes, transphobes, who make any and every attempt to deny us any validity as the women we are. (There are those who also deny men with transsexed histories’ validity; but they, the men, are generally not as demonized as women. Wasn’t it ever thus? Nothing like a good woman to demonize in this kyriarchal world. It’s simply ironic that other women also manage to effect the demonization from positions of societal privilege.)

Thus, as the guitar’s chords fell across the auditorium and Caroline’s voice richly filled the space she drew me into my own life and the battles one allies herself with, avoids, wishes would simply go away or finds other courses to deal with what is almost always a journey to wholeness filled with fear, longing, exhaustion, elation, and at least some demeaning attacks from family, friends, acquaintances or those not comfortably ensconsed in their own lives who require whipping girls to bear their scars and angers.

I would love to have a jewel in my purse for every time I have heard that “one cannot just accept what people say they feel and know. You have to have some scientific proof for that.” Ah, well, Perhaps, But how many people and what types should we subject to testing in order to determine their humanity and the struggles they have to assert that in their lives? Are bible-thumpers, or other believers needful of scientific testing to determine their humanity and their worthiness to be labelled “human?” How about Republicans, or Social Democrats, or women, or men? Are Vietnamese people actually human? Has anyone scientifically tested that?

How many scientists need be subjected to enquiry and testing to determine that the songs that move through their hearts and minds are legitimately human and that we can safely count them among “normal humans?” Have lovers of the novels of Jane Austen sufficiently proven that their feelings about the author’s work are legitimate? How about yourself? Have you been rigorously tested to determine whether or not the love you bear for your spouse, child, lover, mother or sister are true emotions? Have your thoughts about the current world-economic crisis been duly examined? Do your feelings of being alienated and alone, loved and held, that you are male or female, been winnowed through a sieve of scientific research to be certain that you aren’t lying? 

O, please don’t get me wrong. I believe fully that the more exploration we have about scientific discoveries that show again and again that gender-identity, male brains in female bodies and female ones in male bodies is a legitimate human state of being, a state of grace, the better we are able to show that we are exactly as we have said for millenia we are. Such explorations and tests, such writings and discoveries are necessary and positive explorations for the scientist. My friend Zoe Brain has a list of links you can read and see the scientific reults of various such tests that show pretty much without doubt that what I tell you is true about me is definitely true scientifically.

Could there be just the barest possibility given such research, such strength of living as is shown by huge numbers of women and men with transsexing histories, huge populations of people who haven’t, perhaps, as much in-born knowings to be someone, something, other than whom a doctor who raised them and peered between their legs when they were born declared they were and were to be, that those people have a legitimate sense of themselves? That they know what they know? That they are legitimately who they say they are? 

If so, or even if not, what is to become of those transgendered and transsexual people? Are they to be rejected and dismissed because their lives manage in some fashion to undermine a political viewpoint, or a flawed sense of religious belief, that they are in as much a state of grace as any other human is in?

Perhaps what we should rely on to test the humanity and worthiness of another to occupy the spaces we move in as well is to use the recognition test. That’s the one where you regard yourself and see that you are human and know that somehow Universe has brought you into the state of grace that involves a human life. You laugh when pleased, cry when sad or troubled, you embrace others and feel good doing so, you hope and long for different circumstances in your life or you embrace fully every aspect of your life, bleed when you’re cut and often heal, sometimes with scars. Do theirs exhibit that same range? Could it be that they are as human and as valid as you are?

Of course that last aspect of human being demands that I, and you, also embrace the fact that the range of human being and experience is somewhat greater than we often wish it were. Much better, at times, to think that Republicans, scientists, Methodists, or persons of color are not quite as human as I am. 

Maybe such thinking and acting (the dismissal of others’ experience and hope, their knowings) can be comforting as a short-run accomodation, but we all suspect, somewhere deeply within ourselves, that a pathway to Hell lies that way. In getting to know those demonized others, in actually speaking and sitting among them, we begin to vaguely realize that they are also part of that great human being that encompasses us. They too are in states of grace, states of being, that we recognize as being so much like our own and that we can relate with so firmly, hatred becomes impossible or distinctly uncomfortable, to the vast majority of us.

That human trait is perhaps the ultimate State of Grace. Thank you Caroline.

          States of Grace

Shall we walk the narrow way,
Crooked, straight, rough places plain?
Raised up in the yin and yang
Takes her around and back again.
She’s got her act down, 
A shadow of a sound.
Her show’s on the road
‘Cause she knows what she knows.

Can you see her?
I can see her.
can you see her now?
Amidst all her states of grace,
I can see her now.

Tightrope across an ocean wide,
Can we reach the other side
Where china dolls and worlds collide,
Where we fall and are baptized?
She’s got her act down,
A shadow of a sound.
And her show’s on the road
‘Cause she knows
What she knows.
That she knows.

Can you see her?
I can see her.
Can you see her now?
Amidst all her states of grace,
I can see her now.

She’s got a slight frame
For such a heavy burden.
She’s on the highway of her Lord.

Can you see her?
I can see her.
Can you see her now?
Amidst all her states of grace
I can see her now.

~~ Caroline Herring, (c) 2008 ~~

 

Categories: Feminism, Football, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Kyriarchy, Relationship, Theory/Reality, Transgender, Transsexuality, Transsexuals, Women
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What Are We? Transsexuality and Other Human Beings: The Real Deal

September 29, 2008

Have you ever had “one of those weekends?” Right about now you’re probably wondering something on the lines of “what the heck is she talking about? I have one of those weekends every weekend and I’m alive!” 🙂 Yep, so do I. But this weekend, due to the incessant and sometimes violent rain along the East Coast, or due to the the arrangement of the stars and planets as seen from Terra, was simply “one of those weekends” for me. (Right about now I should be sighing deeply, deciding I simply cannot write about it, get up from the iMac and leave this space blank until tomorrow.) 

OK, I’m not following through with that idea. I probably should because, well, it would simply make good sense to do so. I’m not certain that I can make this essay flow through in a way that will be 1), understandable, 2) talk about what I truly want it to talk about, 3) write it in such a way that I don’t simply lash-out at something and manage to alienate a whole flock of folks in doing so. (Insert the deep sigh here.)

It was one of THOSE weekends. Is that plainer? My partner and I have had a struggle lately and yesterday we spent about three hours away from the boys just hashing things out. I was trying to get together an essay to write today in the afternoon and got a really nice comment from someone I’ve also met in “real life.” Then the biggie, the one I sat and ranted and cried about, after already crying a great deal, for hours last night. Then I got a call, after emailing a pretty broad hint, from a very good friend and we chatted about what I was then crying about. Finally I got a letter that said:

And I also think, that even though you and I both don’t ever say it outright – it would be rude – that there is a hell of a difference in saying “I was/am a ______ ” and I’m trying to make it to that” and “I really, really am a failure at being a _________, hence, I should be the other.”  

That, is a very different deal than being a tranny.  A real tranny loves and worships the other, rather than hating what they are, and that’s a huge difference, and we have many that run on hate, not love and worship.  They don’t really want to be men [/women], and I mean “Men”[/”Women”], they just don’t want to be girls [/boys.]  And they fail to realize that the grownup part of male is ‘man’ not ‘boy’.

But, you are the real deal, you knew what you were and became it.  

Now, you truly are wondering, truly, “what the Hell is she on about!”

I don’t always like his words, my letter-writing friend, but I think I understand them.

Most of all, I think he “gets it.” No, not because he referred to me as “the real deal,” but because he has a specific type of human being in mind when he refers to “tranny.” (I really do wish he’d use something other than “tranny.” But, since I have a real and deep affection for him, I don’t make a fuss when he uses it. From him it’s not pejorative, even if it makes me cringe when I read it. Plus, like I said, I don’t just think he “gets it,” I know he does, even if I’d say it an entirely different way.)

He tries to understand without living it. Does a good job of that. I live it. I’ll probably always talk and know differently than he will when it comes to “transsexuality.” I love him though. He makes the effort.  

I’ve had that “real deal” trope used about me before, way more than once, “you’re the real deal,” or the “real thing.” It’s been used by other people with histories of transsexing and by people who have never had any deeply-defined inner knowing that they walk through this world in bodies that are somehow not being read right by their fellow human beings, ordinary, garden-variety cissexual folks. [I know! the verbiage and the meanings of transsexing words often escape the untutored cissexual person who has never in their lives had to know that their body didn’t match their internal make-up. Just bear with me.]

So, “real deals.”

Transsexuals have the strong feeling, often from childhood onwards, of having been born the wrong sex. The possible psychogenic or biological etiology of transsexuality has been the subject of debate for many years [1,2]. Here we show that the volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a brain area that is essential for sexual behaviour [3,4], is larger in men than in women. A female-sized BSTc was found in male-to-female transsexuals. The size of the BSTc was not influenced by sex hormones in adulthood and was independent of sexual orientation. Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones [5,6].

That’s the “real deal.” You can read it: Zhou, et al. Nature, 378: 68-70 (1995). Just go here, there’s a reprint. (Sorry, I didn’t feel like signing into my grad school library and copying the original. Besides, you may not have been able to get to the article without paying for it at this point. The reprint is readily available.) The “real deal” is that there is scientific evidence that shows that people with male and female bodies externally have differentiated brains that match the neural make-up of the sex we know we are. 

The same authors have made a few newer studies (0021-972X/00/$03.00/0 Vol. 85, No. 5 The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism Copyright © 2000 by The Endocrine Society,  http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/reprint/85/5/2034;  “Male-to-Female Transsexuals Show Sex-Atypical Hypothalamus Activation When Smelling Odorous Steroids”, Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(8):1900-1908.   http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/8/1900) but that first one was the one that set off the storm. If you wish to find other citations just Google “zhou transsexuality” and you’ll find pages, not all in agreement with the brain-sex science.) 

As my friend, Zoe Brain, says, it’s not as certain as the [First Law of Thermodynamics] (actually she used some other scientifically-accepted theory/law) but it is as certain as the Theory of Gravity in which we cannot define, exactly, the force, but we know it’s there and how it works. So, at the risk, I’m willing to take it, of puncturing the “scientific” credentials of Kenneth Zucker, Paul McHugh, Ray Blanchard, Anne Lawrence, J. Michael Bailey as well as various individuals with a transsexed history: the brain-sex theory is a fact.

Transsexuals have brain-maps that mirror the brain-maps of those cissexual people we identify ourselves with. Pretty simple, really. That some, listed above, psychologists and psychiatrists want to deny that people have brain-sexes based on Rohrschach Tests, neo-Freudian faith and their own prejudices amounts not to a hill of beans.

Guys, you are simply wrong. Get over it, accept it, and let’s work to discover exactly how this works. And let’s forget about your pet thought-experiments and do some real science, not this so-called social-science research with plesy-myth-o-graphs, (penile plethysmograph that cannot be said at all to measure what Kurt Freund, Ray Blanchard and Kenneth Zucker want to imagine it can measure.) There’s no science in it.  

O, and for those of you who are concerned that I am hereby tossing all the cross-dressers, drag-queens, transgender-people, androgynous and genderqueer folk under the bus. Forget about it. I suspect that there are much better scientific explanations for their conditions that may have a lot to do with brain-sex as well. (The lines have yet to be drawn as firmly as they have for transsexuals.) Certainly much more to do with brain sex than the totally socially-prejudiced and prejudicial, nasty, vague and totally demeaning definition for “transvestic fetishism” currently promoted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders by the esteemed American Psychiatric Association. Time to stop “pathologizing” every behavior we simply feel uncomfortable with in ourselves. 

I’ve spent years working with mentally-ill people and with social misfits. There’s a difference and it’s evident, between mentally-ill folk and those we simply feel uncomfortable with because we don’t agree with what they do. Therapists and psychiatrists are not sworn to protect social “norms” or the insurance companies. We are sworn to “do no harm” and to alleviate pain as much as possible.

Time to associate ourselves with our jobs and our callings rather than playing some political game or trying to bolster our own sense that “everyone is like me.” Nor must we continue to maintain our belief and our preconceived ideological bases in the face of some scientific evidence that our thought-experiments were abjectly wrong. Such things would be one’s own problem; they don’t have to be laid on a host of decent human beings. 

Now, reality. And how does all of this build from what you’ve already read? Lemme see if I can’t get you there. Between four and five years ago my partner prevailed on me to join a local chapter of the Unitarian-Universalist Association. I did, we did, and almost immediately became involved with a local chapter of the UUA Interweave group. The local group was tapped to “plan and carry out” a service about four months after we joined.

Caught up in the “acceptance” and  “liberality” of the congregation I agreed to do a small talk about myself. Sadly, in retrospect, I got up in-front of two services and talked about transsexuality and it’s effect on me. The results at the time were quite positive, People I’d never met embraced me and expressed support.

Over time I’ve seen, rather felt, that support drift. I’ve realized that there never was any understanding. Understanding would imply some knowledge and the ability to make distinctions and to know better than to mistake a transsexual for a cross-dresser. One “dresses up” the other lives their life as the sex they are. Instead, there was the semblance of understanding that never was more than skin-deep for many. They simply “wanted to do the right thing.” Many of them will vote for Barack Obama because “it’s the right thing,” but there will continue to be few if any African-American faces in the congregation that years ago left it’s roots in Trenton for the more exclusively white suburban nature of Hopewell Township. 

It’s not that people are bad, cold-hearted or liars. It’s simply a matter that they cannot “get their minds and hearts” around difference. Why? For the same reason we all have trouble with that. We presume our experience, our prejudices, are the default way to human being. Difference is not something we are comfortable with. In point-of-fact, when we get the idea that there might be some personal danger in remaining in Trenton we move to a nice, white suburb. It’s because we are afraid, not because we don’t want to associate with people of color. 

Thus, people, particularly males, who used to hug me after services when they merely presumed I was a lesbian, now offer to “shake my hand” while they continue to hug other women. Women who probably had no clue as to my history until I shared it with them have insisted that I cannot take part in “women’s groups” because “these are not for males. You know, you were born male.”

Well, no, I don’t know any such thing. I know I was born with a brain and soul that managed to be wired somewhat differently than most of the body I was born into. I know that there is a growing body-of-scientific-evidence that supports exactly what I just wrote. I also know you haven’t bothered to make yourself acquainted with the evidence, or the reality. Would you imagine that a Melanesian and an African-American or a Kenyan were all the same based on skin-color?  

Yesterday our 10-year old went to spend the afternoon at the home of boys whom he likes immensely. When I arrived to pick him up I was invited into the house and the father called out, “Ian, your father is here to pick you up.” OUCH!! That didn’t just hurt, it devastated. The man then asked, “Is it father or mother?”  What did my answer, mother, really matter? What he thought he knew because I had told him years ago was what he was comfortable with. He’s not comfortable with the idea that sex is not an easy discernment whereby knowing what genitalia someone once possessed is enough to label them forever. I mean, look at those very educated, very much acquainted-with-the-field people I named up there. They have the same difficulty. 

It’s always about their comfort. What I think I may know will always trump what you may know intimately. 

The UUA writes this in it’s web-lit about “Welcoming Congregations” (the congregation I attend has a plaque on it’s wall at the back of the sanctuary it received at one time for becoming a welcoming congregation.)

In 1987, a UUA committee was formed to collect information about how welcomed and accepted gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons felt in their UU congregations. Many individuals reported that they felt unaffirmed, unwelcomed, and unsupported in their liberal religious communities. This hurtful exclusion—much of it very subtle and most of it quite unintentional—has made many people feel that they don’t really belong or have a safe space in our congregations. As a result, many either drift away or stay “in the closet”, hiding basic facts about who they are from other members of their congregations.

Plaques are all truly lovely things to have fastened to one’s walls. But, the fact remains that the vast majority, I mean all but one I am aware of, transsexuals and trangender people leave that congregation and go elsewhere to pursue our lives. Possibly because the plaque on the wall doesn’t provide anyone with much support, understanding or in any way actually reflect the acted-out behavior of the parishioners. Instead the plaque is a symbol that people can point toward, if they think of it, and feel good about themselves. 

I will give credit to two women at the congregation especially, although there are others who also “get it.” One is a very mature and basically quite outspoken and blunt person and the other a woman who argued that I shouldn’t be allowed in a “women’s group.” I talked to both of them. The elder woman I dearly love. To be honest, if she thinks of me as male she doesn’t say so, although in the past she did ask about cross-dressing. Instead we now just girl-talk. She’s my friend and in simply coming to love each other and care for one another we have also come to understanding. I think she might just tell you, “Of course, Radha is a woman. What the heck else would you think she is?”

The younger one I approached and eventually we got to a place where I asked her how she might feel if she had been raised by her parents as a male-child when she was female. She actually stopped abruptly and said she’d have to consider that. Then I asked if she was still a Southern Baptist, having been raised in that denomination. Again, she stopped abruptly. There have been no further situations in which she was apparently dismissing me for the way I was raised, afterall, she was raised as a Southern Baptist herself. Perhaps she has seen that the interior might well reflect the outward surface and that “mistakes have been made.”

At any rate, there are reasons why we chose to hide very intimate parts of our lives from the people we worship with. The “liberality” of a congregation is no bar to prejudice, ignorance and the lack of urgency of those we associate with to discover the truth, or some truths about us. Even the religious right nabob, Pat Robertson can educate himself on the basics:    

There are people who are born with various types of hormonal activity in their bodies and they feel more male than female or more female than male.

Perhaps it would not be too much to think that our liberal allies would do at least as much? Or must we all simply go worship at the Wrath of God Bible Church where they will willingly accept us as parishioners as long as they cannot tell where we came from? 

Either way, the pain and hiding remain paramount for the person who is transsexual. They hurt. Well-meaning though other people may be, it seems to me if one is going to put themselves out there as “welcoming,” then just maybe, learning who, what and how one is welcoming to be part of your community might be incumbent upon yourself, not, perhaps, upon your guest. 

So, reality? The reality is that when I can know what to expect then I can deal with that. When I simply believe that people listened and heard I find myself exposed to a great deal of behavior that brings me to tears and anger. Isn’t it time to teach, and isn’t it time to learn rather than both of us assuming we know?

My partner said yesterday, after my tears were dried and my anger had simply changed to disappointment and the thought I would just as well stop even trying to be part of a welcoming congregation, “O, Radha, you know, honey, you made a decision to be either stealth or out to them. There’s a price that has to be paid.”

Yeah, she’s absolutely spot-on. One does make that decision and sometimes I truly anguish about the one I made, even in the writing of this blog and the choice of ways I make to get it read. I wonder about whether or not my being “out” is worth the price I pay for it. The pangs and torments of the heart, those are forever the most difficult. 

But, here it is, another blog winding down to its terminal words and I truly know I am going to push that “publish” button to my right in just a few more lines. I cast my lot some time ago. Too late and too unsatisfactory to change my mind at this point. Heck, maybe I can actually make an easier way for another woman or man to pass this way in future. Here’s the clincher. 

Please, don’t just think you know because you are liberal. Know to learn: because it’s the right thing to do, and because you are liberal and have a good heart.

I’m open for telephone calls and speaking engagements at the church.

Categories: Connection, Gender, Inclusion, Otherness, Privilege, Psychology, Social Relations, Transsexuality, Transsexuals
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Comments: 8 Comments

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

September 26, 2008

Over years I’ve been struck by the singular parallels between the story Phillip K. Dick was moved to write in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in the lives of the transgendered, particularly the lives of transsexuals who change our bodies and often the sense among others that we have changed our humanity to something meant not as an experience of “the self made whole,” but as an affront to them. Somehow we forego, I think others think, the humanity that graces us all.  

The struggle of the novel is separation: what separates the “andy” from the human? In the novel the separation is two-fold: 1) the “andy’s” inability to replicate cells (thus, they live for four years and die) and 2) the “andy’s” inability to feel empathy and any truly expansive emotion such as love or even hate. Like the “sociopath” the “andy’s” internal emotional make-up is limited to self-referrent emotion: “I hurt, this is bad” while “other-referrent” emotions do not exist for the androids.

I have wondered in my life if other humans do not see myself, my brothers and sisters with transsexual histories, in this way. I have wondered if they do not understand that our emotional and feeling capacities are the same as their own. How else the deep loathing among some, their willingness to feel a personal affront when they “discover” us, their ability to kill a Brandon Teena, a Chanelle Pickett, a Gwen Araujo or an Angie Zapata as ruthlessly, as without regret, as they might kill a fly or a mosquito: Deckards without the thought that goes with the act itself. 

Thus, I sit here, reading again a letter from a friend I received yesterday morning. He was writing in response to me about empathy, about there being times when you simply have to say a thing exactly as you see it and not worry too much about how the way you say it will be felt: for the purpose is to drive home some fact-of-existence that seems important to you that your interlocutor hears and hears with out varnish. “No sugar-coating” as we say in addiction/recovery circles. 

One of my favorite places in the world is Lake Tahoe.  I love to ski at a place called Heavenly Valley.  If you go up on the Nevada/California border there is a great place to stop for lunch.  If you face to the East, you look down from the mountain and across a vast wasteland, devoid of water, a perfect desert with its warm browns and tans rolling out into infinity.

 But, all you have to do is turn yourself around a little bit and what you see is Lake Tahoe, surrounded by peaks covered with snow and trees and the snow-covered mountains seem endless.

 Same place.  Same eyes, very different views.

And so it is true. My eyes do not see the same world as you see. We stand in different places and have come by different paths to reach that high ridge over Heavenly Valley. Perhaps we will ski it together after we have stood and looked down until we can look no longer and must be on our way. What do we each take from the experience? Could I, in a million years of trying, see the same memories and grant the same importance to the texture that he grants it? 

I suspect not, not exactly. I would see that sight for the first time, he for the hundredth. The five-hundredth? With each sight his vision has grown. His internal reactions would be far more nuanced and accentuated by all of the other experiences of the sight he has had before we might go there together. 

My vision would be the vision of the first appearance: the infinitely more emotional, less-refined and definitely less-nuanced experience of the novice. I might gasp, or shiver, might just stand and stare out into the vastness of landscape and be awed by the way it dwarfs me with its beauty, with its grandeur. In my emotion I might turn to him and hug him, thanking him for bringing me to such a dramatic place.

My reactions, of course, would change his as well, add one more bit of texture to his memory the next time he came that way to look. We can never quite come to a place where we match our points-of-view: visual, aural, emotional, rational. In our journeys to that place where we stand beside or against one another we remain separate, climbing a slightly different path and seeing from a slightly different vantage with a very different history brought to bear on the experience we each take from the thing-itself.

In that fashion we are all unable to communicate fully, for the way we nuance words and thoughts will always be limned with the differences of the experiences we have had that brought us to that moment of togetherness. The quality of relationship is forever strained. Although the quality of mercy must never be.

It’s in mercy that I could touch my friend and experience the rare beauty and feel, somewhere, something similar to his view of place, of interaction, by being there with him and seeing through my own eyes, in his presence, what he sees through his eyes, alone or with another. Regardless if he were simply my friend, or my lover, my mentor or student he would always remain different, with eyes that see another place as I although we view the same place.

Hence, Dick’s question: do androids dream of electric sheep?

You will make an answer of your own, as I have done. I believe that they dream of the same sheep as are in human dreams, vague, fluffy, sometimes bleating, meandering slowly across the meadow they are penned in. Dream sheep penned in a dream meadow with dream eyes full upon them, counting.

In our dreams we court one another, wishing for deep connection because we are human, even the transsexuals, even the transgender folk who people, vaguely, this world we all pass through and into. Our experiences, our winnowing of experience, and the transformation of those experiences into thought and the ways we define the world run along similar neural pathways and come to rest in similar neural pools of knowledge where a dream salmon leaps.

If we catch the salmon and cook it for food we might touch the heating flesh of salmon and burn our fingertip. Whereupon we will put the tip to our tongues to cool it; and, so, gain, like Taliesyn, the knowledge that the salmon in the well of the world holds within it. Perhaps we will see in the aftermath of that touch that our similarities out-weigh the experiences and the dicta we’ve internalized as guides to “the way things are.” Perhaps in that taste of salmon grease we can find our likenesses to one another as well as we perceive our separations from one another. 

I suppose we shared a childhood, though mine was somewhat less vivid.  The forest at Pioneer Park was not exactly as you describe yours, but it was enchanted nonetheless.

I went there a few years ago, I had not been in over 4 decades and it seemed so small, what once bordered on the infinite now was an easy walk from one end to the other.  Had it shrunk?  Or had I grown in some way?  And how exactly are you sure of that answer?

Yes! The matter is sharing and recognition of that sharing. The matter is not that we are different, but that in our differences we can and have shared in some fashion that similarity of childhood, adolescence, adulthood. The matter is that we can both hear Jerry Garcia and know that somehow we are both in the rapture of lyric and music. Somewhere inside the other the music and lyrics conjure up for each of us a river, a kind of love that we might, if we imagine it completely, share.  

http://www.dead.net/song/brokedown-palace

Fare you well, my honey
Fare you well, my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Are flown, except you alone

Gonna leave this brokedown palace
On my hands and my knees, I will roll, roll, roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll

In a bed, in a bed
By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

River gonna take me, sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home
It’s a far gone lullaby sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home

Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Going to plant a weeping willow
On the bank’s green edge it will grow, grow, grow
Singing a lullaby beside the water
Lovers come and go, the river will roll, roll, roll

Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul.

We never step in the same river twice. Nor, I think, can any of us step in the same river as does the one walking beside us. That river is forever different. For some the Mississippi, for others the Waikato, the Watauga, or Stones River. The names of rivers sometimes define us: Dneiper, Passaic, Sacramento, Wabash, Blue Nile, Orinoco, Vaal, Maas, Donau, Evapanitsa, Nyanga, Oxus, Krishna, Mekong, Salween, Olenyok, Amu Darya, Loire, Po, Washita. There are endless rivers and endless steps through them. There are endless human beings who have and will and do step into them and feel the water, never the same water, flow across their feet. 

The quality we must define is the context in which we hold one another. Our determination is not the content of another’s dreams, for they will be, like the rivers, the same, but different. The quality we must define is the quality of separation that we find amongst ourselves. Are we all human? Do we bleed and cry, hope and laugh, are our tears able to flow across similar cheeks and are our minds filled with similar longings, similar dreams? 

Then, in the finding we must ask, very simply, what separates us: he and I? 

Is his heart somehow crafted differently because he doesn’t have the deep desire, the deep need, to make his body congruent with his self as I have felt for a lifetime? Does the fact that he sees importance in forthrightness and words that slice through bullshit and into the heart of the matter make him so very different that somewhere within myself I cannot find respect and similarity, love?

We each will find our answers, if we ever bother to ask of ourselves the question. What makes another so different from me that I fear them, hate them, desire to see their extermination or exile from this land I walk? 

I cannot find comfort with only my own small kind: with those who love simply the things I love. Although the objects of that love, that comfort, are different, I see within them the same straining core: the need for companionship and friendship, the need to be needed and wanted, to embrace and to communicate beauty, truth, hope, longing, joy, sadness, horror and triumph. 

For so long that it’s become cliche and (in that defining word, “cliche,” we make a thing become meaningless for all too many) we breathe the same air and take comfort and joy in so many similar things that I wonder at the ways we percolate division among us. The division never seems to be limited to others very unlike us exteriorly, but also applies within our various human tribes to those who are so like us that our pasts might be written by the same writer on the same page with the same ink. 

Do androids dream of electric sheep? No! They dream the same sheep as I, tend them as I tend my own flock. 

Thank you my distant friend for the experience of reading your letter. Thank you for the thought and the feeling it’s brought me. Thank you for the love I have come to bear for you and the knowledge that through distance and time, there is so much alike in us that we might, on a cold day, at the top of Heavenly Valley, remove our hands from our gloves, touch fingertips and stare into the other’s eyes. Thank you for the chance to don again the gloves and to turn and ski down the slope together: separately but interwined, intractably and exquisitely.

Categories: Beauty, Civil Rights, Connection, Feminism, Friendship, Gender, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Language, Love, Men, Otherness, Politics, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Social Relations, Thoughts, Transgender, Transsexuality, Transsexuals, Women
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