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.
To A T 
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