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Moon Daughter

January 13, 2009

There does exist a universal human condition … historical conditions vary … a [person] may be born a feudal lord or a proletarian. What does not vary is the necessity for h[er] to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The basic problem of human existence is so simple that no philosopher has succeeded in stating it. People do not spend their time ‘weighing up existence’ in order to get through the average working day. And yet, everything we do betrays a basic attitude to life, revealing that, in a certain sense, everything has been weighed up and judged. — Colin Wilson

It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an unpalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory … in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary … I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found … that I would have nothing to say. — The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Saturday came snow, swift wind blowing icy rain in from the south only to freeze it as it fell. Eventually the rain became flakes and swirled about like gauze, Leucothea’s scarf offered to the wandering female Odysseus who stood beyond backlit windows staring into the cold and gloom. So, at the beckon of fata morgana she went out, drove through the drifting flakes up-river as far as Uhlerstown, past houses and villages, a few scattered shops and restaurants, across the metal bridge into New Jersey. Thence she wandered back again toward home as the snowfall increased and decreased. Eventually she drove to a halt at her home where she stood on the porch watching the last flakes die and the clouds move north.

Sunday she looked out, saw a bit more snow had scattered across the car roof after she’d returned and gone to bed. She saw the sun. Then she spent the day reading, finding about dusk that a war had broken out in a couple of blogs, discovering that she’d received a helping of bitterness elsewhere from one of the arguers. Thought a lot about vanity and how she, like other humans, can be such a thrall to it’s service.

In the afternoon, between our rising and my reading, Catherine and I made a short drive to a nature center nearby to sit in a bird blind and be amazed at chickadees, cardinals and a few grey titmouses as they fluttered and swooped to gather suet and seeds hanging from ropes and limbs expressly there to draw them for the waiting eyes of those brave enough that day to sit for hours on wooden benches in an unheated shed and watch them and the one scrawny, adolescent raccoon who ambled through as though on some important mission of political import.

That night in the cold and howling wind I went out and looked at the sky, found clouds had blown in once more and clothed, through her shining light, Luna who floated in the southeastern sky like the similacrum of a goddess descending toward earth in her glory, citron streaks, translucent white, a swirl of icy clouds giving the illusion of mist or gauze and the Great Goddess hanging in the azure, cold air like a dream thrust at mid-night into my mind as I slept on a downy pillow, entangled in the limbs of my solitary, sleeping heart-mate.

We returned inside and I wandered to the Web, saw that the arguments with those who seemed more intent on claiming space for themselves that might better have been left alone for all the lack of any purpose shown: except the purpose of arousing anger and tossing about invective as though it were the small transparent papers that wrap a piece of candy one thrusts into the mouth and then drops the wrapper for onto the street had grown large. The arguments seemed much of a kind — a desire to cause upset or argument, a focus of anger, dismissal and the drumbeat of a dissonance I’ve read a few too many times already. It doesn’t recede for long, such arguments, such hostilities.

It all seemed so very disheartening and vain.

I found myself wondering at the way so many of we women with transsexed-histories never seem to get it right in our own minds. I wondered at how we so often appear to need and desire a spiritual and mental salvation through the ediface of recognition and acceptance for whom we are by someone other than ourselves.

O, that tends to be a human need as well — one writ large throughout our written history. We scale mountains, breast churning seas, stand at the lips of volcanic cauldrons, ski down 180 degree slopes to get the thrill, the inner-knowing(?) that we are truly as good, as useful as any other, as remarkably intelligent and real as we say we are.

For, it seems from the outside-looking-in that these invective-strewn arguments are simply that: the rowdy and screaming-fit pleas of the toddler or pre-adolescent or adolescent to be noticed. They manage to do nothing except stir emotions of the baser sort. They heap-up nasty tropes to the efficacy of the heaper: so she might say, “see I have it all over you and you.” A sandlot baseball game played by youngish boys to see who’s best. There’s screaming over what the ground-rules are, who did what and how much a difference that would make tomorrow in someone’s mind. Sunday backyard heroes and heroines. Does anyone ever recall the score after a day or two?

The point, it seems to me, is to grow-up. One should actually transition one’s life. O, don’t get me wrong. The way I look or might look is important to me as well. I mean, isn’t that the standard by which our cultures raise us? If you’re female you have to look good? You must be able to attract attention by your looks? For isn’t that the way to efficacy? Some guy finds you attractive?

Male or female that seems to be the point anymore. Watch the videos we allow our children to watch and see where the “sexual revolution” has gone, how much the Second Wave and the Third Wave have made women free of being only the objects of lust. Above me that night as I read the moon changed her garments to silver and shown through the clouds with a face so full and rich that she took my breath away.

So very lovely was she, clothed in her cloudy gauze and lace, that I called to Catherine to come and see and we stood on the sidewalk hand-in-hand agape, light streaming down on us, lightening her brown and reddish hair to a silvered-dark and my silver tones to scintillating-silver as the light, cold wind ruffled strands and scattered them about our heads.

********

Through the years I have seen and read much from other transsexing, transsexed women. I know your pain, your victories, your sense that somehow all this should be placed behind you and you should take your place, finally, in that great mass of human beings who, although they have some body parts and facial flaws (how flaws, I wonder, the face, one’s body, is what it is, allow it’s changes as they come, or pay to get others, but the largest flaw is having no body at all) they’d rather not be there. I know the urge to simply walk into a new life unknown for who you are and where you came from. While above my head shone the moon, almost ageless when compared to my short span of days.

I’ve known those urges, those fears, myself and have no problem recalling, when I read them, the pleas to simply find a lover who doesn’t know. One wishes to just be “myself.” No explanations will do, I must have no tinge of doubt of “how people look at me.”

Is there an answer? O, I think there is. I think it’s often pointed to in the lives of those like Calpernia Addams, Candice Kane, Lynn Conway, Andrea James, Zoe Brain, Abby, Veronica who sometimes leaves messages on this blog, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Melanie Phillips and many others. I’m afraid my typing fingers will tire before I could make a complete list, or even one large enough to give you some reasonable notion of their numbers.

I believe it isn’t that they have no concerns about the things that move so many of us. I would imagine that in their own lives they’ve been as worried as I once was about efficacy. I imagine they have each and every one wondered “How male do I look? Will people accept me? Can anyone imagine this condition? How will I find my place in the world and put this all behind me?”

I don’t know that any of us ever put it all behind us. Although, I’ve found that unless I am writing an essay like this or around other women and men of transsexing-histories it seldom enters my thoughts that I am not “just like you, Louisa. I had mumps in first grade too!”

Another blogger, one who was involved in that messiness I mentioned above, opined recently that at one time I had some admiration for her and her thoughts, the movement she maybe pushes now. It’s true. I did. For, don’t you know, I was as unsure and as in need of a feeling that I was special somehow and as real somehow as any other human being desires to be. I, too, felt that others in the great transgender group would somehow undermine the way people thought of me. Somehow I’d get lost; I’d be mistaken for someone I am not and haven’t been.

I needed as much as anyone else that feeling that I was a real-live human being and that this syndrome that had caused me so much pain and doubt through the years was not simply a mental illness. I wasn’t crazy and Virginia Prince was an insidious and harmful ogre who, although decrepit and changing to dust in a California nursing home, had somehow made it unsafe for me to walk through the world and be recognized for who I am: just another woman. (Perhaps it’s time to let Virginia go. She’s left us anyway at this point. A name and a few notions are hardly harmful to my life, hardly the justification for a crusade of anger and hate.)

Those evil transgender would make certain my life would become garbage. Of course, that was a reasonably long time ago, or so it feels today, and I felt the urges of the early stages of transition, the after-effects of those early stages, and the intense relief at finally reaching a stage where “I’m different now.”

How different was I then? Not so much, but very much as well. I was very fearful of acceptance or, more the point, I think, it’s lack. As I look at my life now I can see acceptance all around. At some point my younger and more fearful sisters just need to feel the actuality of their lives: someone else living far away doesn’t make your life worse. You do that all by yourself. If you walk in fear and lack-of-belief in yourself, no lover, no dating service, no women’s group or move across the world is going to make you feel better: not for long. You’ll find those same fears and feelings tucked neatly into the luggage you’ll bring with you.

To feel better and know yourself will help and make, eventually, you see that you are accepted and that drag-queens, transvestites, cissexual women, transgender, genderqueers have never kept you from a thing that you were not afraid to touch and grasp for yourself. The fear we project onto others is the fear we hold of ourselves, how others are going to perceive us. It’s pretty simple. Really!

Their rights to live peaceful lives doing what they wish don’t hurt me in the least. They keep me not from employment, friendships, using my abilites as best I can, nor from feeling perfectly comfortable with who I am and have been. That discomfort’s always caused by my own fears and doubts, never by the fear and doubts about those others. Often we sadly miss this point: another’s demeaning and rejection doesn’t make me more worthy. It merely adds to the woes of the world.

The Religious Right fear campaigns in Montgomery County, MD, and Gainesville, FL, about who will be walking into toilets and how, aren’t about “genderqueers and drag-queens and transvestites” like some of us would like to believe. It’s about fear and unreasoning hatred and installing people’s worst fears in the front of their minds to make it easier and better somehow to justify their own fears and prejudices they hold deeply within themselves: all talk of God and Grace just window-dressing that they hope you’ll see and ignore the hatred and fear they harbor within. It’s that simple.

That won’t change if there are great walls erected between people of transsexed and transsexing-histories and all those others on the sex/gender variant spectrum. I mean, just stop and think a moment. The only sure way it is said one can tell a difference is that one has proof of surgery done to our genitals. As I’ve said before, that kind of leaves out those who haven’t yet, for some or another reason, maybe like just beginning transition, had surgery.

Is the larva unrelated to the adult? Can the pupa be real only after it’s molted completely? If so, how can one tell anyway? Is a distinction only made through the size of one’s bank account or how much they might have gone into debt? I mean, what are we talking about here? Etiology or social status?

The only thing that will change the fear and loathing of ourselves by others is not an operation, not the demeaning of others so like us that they draw the same sustenance from the same air and food we draw ours from. The only thing that’s gonna change it is the same thing that allowed a man of African-American heritage to be recently elected POTUS: time and a realization that our fears are just our fears, vague nightmares held over from childhood and having no basis in anything we might call reality.

Those fears will only be removed by others becoming used to seeing us, by knowing us as we are and have been, by them realizing that the man next door and the woman in the pew up there are people just like them and have no designs on the lives of their children nor on their own lives. We simply want to go out and feel the pull of the moon in our bodies.

Thus, if you live in constant fear, you’re gonna be fearful, always. You’ll miss the pull of the moon because you’ll only ever feel the pull of your own fear. That’s, I know, why those women I listed above are so very important. They show us all a way out. They live into themselves and they do so in such a way that others find they are not frightening or weird or some creature who’ll devour them in the night.

But, try to tell that to someone freshly done the physical parts of her transition, or someone just beginning. I mean, there’s usually already enough fear and longing there that … well, that it’s fairly a natural human response to think that the distinction somehow makes one complete, just like her, somehow now safe from scrutiny or ever again being rejected for who she is.

It’s ever the fear, I think, of one member of a minority when she compares herself to another. “Look, I would you weren’t so dark, for your darkness reminds the whites that even though I am lighter than many of them that I am still, somehow, dark like you. And so they hate us both, me and you, for the accidents of birth.” I can imagine that set of sentences presented at almost any time African-Americans have lived in this country. Hopefully such ideas are waning.

Those, it seems to me, are the same ideas that many of us transsexed and transsexing women and men have when it comes to others: you will somehow reflect badly on me. We humans do that with our children, our friends, political and social movements. We do it because our social humanity makes us fear being different. But, mostly we do it with those who we see as being somehow less-than we are, yet similar enough to be mistaken for one of us. “I’m sure the dominants would accept me if they weren’t confusing me with you. If they didn’t think I were a Jewess, a Negro, an Irishwoman, a Christian ….” It never ends: the ways we divide ourselves and the ways we’d like those divisions to be drawn to distinctly leave us in the dominant classes.

I believe those women I listed above are showing us a way, a way that might just lead us into an understanding of ourselves and our own worth without us having to demean and reject the efficacy of other human beings, without our having to become as foreboding as the SS Totenkampf guards allowing people to pass into and back out again of the Warsaw Ghetto. They live their lives and thrive. I’m sure they still receive hatred and dismissal. Who among us doesn’t get dismissed sometimes for whatever reasons another might feel within themself to dismiss us?

We simply go about our lives. We are who and what we are and we damned well better get used to it and not fear so much that someone or someones are gonna reject and demean us just ’cause we are different. That’s the way these fights are always ameliorated. People go about their lives knowing who they look like, where they came from for all that their skin is darker, their religion is different, their facial features are different, but that, by damn, they are human beings and have abilities and phooey on you if you’re so blind as not to be able to see that.

 ********

My friend, Ilsa, plies her trade out west and sends me snatches of letters sometimes like this one.

Of course I noticed the Moon. I am usually aware of it as it tracks through its “phases”. It always seems to be going through a phase. It is in the first quarter, or is it just going through a phase? I can relate to that. It is in a constantly transitional state, perhaps. I can relate. 

Yeah, I was thinking of you.  … what caught my eye and made me think of you was that as we approached the harbor and sailed through it I was struck by the low tide. (Not literally! Though you could have had that experience if you weren’t mindful.) It was hard to miss though there was so much harbor sticking up out of the water. 

We rode close to the back of the breakwater and it just loomed over our heads with so much sand and rock evident. The ramp down to the dock really could have used a rope tow device to ascend up to the harbor walk. I heard it was one of the lowest tides we have had, in a long time, in years, this year, or maybe ever, I can’t remember. Any of those seemed plausible to me as I looked up the ramp and then once at the top looked down to the boats below me, all because the Moon is riding close to us.

… later at home, I went out back as I usually do with the girls so that they can do their necessary business. Of course I noticed the Moon. It was shouting photons at me. My back yard was all shadows and silhouettes in blue. The aluminum on the rim of my roof was blue and glinted just a bit. I had a flashlight in my hand as always but I didn’t need to turn it on. The dogs were followed by shadow puppies at their heels. The trees and peeper plants cast their shadows like nets on the ground. I was easily caught up in it all. I thought of you.

As I thought of her while I stood watching that orb rise through the clouds and far into the night sky … .

As I thought of Catherine and some of my friends who are, like me, attracted to the moon … . 

I thought of other women I’ve come to admire or love as I have known, or known of, them. It always seems to be other women I think of as attracted to the moon, by the moon, how she pulls us in the tides of blood and water through our very bodies.

Of course she attracts men as well, they just seem, in my mind, less subject to the attraction. But, perhaps if you take them out and allow them to sit quiet for a moment and watch … perhaps then there would rise in them that same attraction so many of my friends have. I imagine there are many men for whom that’s already true.

Mother, I think, set the moon in our sky so we could have light to guide us brightly at night, through the hours when our worst fears will strike through the dark and snatch us by the nape and shake us until we tremble and quake, demand that we give way to the atavistic fears and loathings we had in-bred in us when out ancestors ran frightened through passages in the earth from powerful beasts who dwarfed them, ate them, frightened them with roarings in the dark.

Our fears come from those places, through that very limbic sytem that comes more and more to the fore to show, scientifically, that we, men and women with transsexed histories, are exactly who we have said we are: people whose bodies don’t comform to our brain differentiations. Such an ironic twist: our fears and our hopes locked into the same small spaces of brain and nerve, traveling along the same pathways, pulled like tides by the shining orb in the night sky, the fiery orb of our daylight hours.

We have nothing to fear, but fear itself. How true I have seen those words to be in my own life. — Until I met and got to know those I feared I found it easier to loathe them, to believe they would in some fashion make me less-than. Perhaps a few I could still fear and loathe had they done me some disservice, made some action that kept me from my living or put me in danger of death or maiming. But, those who might have done that do not stand as representatives of everyone I perceive in some fashion like them. All men are not rapists because I once met two who were.

There’s another rich and poignant saying that I often use as a signature for it tells a truth so profound that it overwhelms my fear, gives me peace and sustenance in the night: I have loved the stars too well to be afraid of the dark.

I think it’s way past time that we instilled that into ourselves and realized that there are, perhaps, things to fear, but most of them can be ameliorated and changed by coming to knowledge of ourselves rather than by embracing our fears and our loathings. Familiarity doesn’t simply breed contempt: it breeds understanding and acceptance as well.

Tonight I’ll go out again and think of Ilsa, of Veronica, think of all those myriad human beings who pass each day in the world with me and feel the pull of the moon. Mother. She calls me, She calls you, to recognize the truth: we are daughters and sons of identical parentage, pulled along like tides through the aethereal glow of the heavens and earth.

Namaste.

Categories: Connection, Feminism, Hearts and Minds, Intersectionality, Moon, Relationship, Social Relations, Transgender, Transsexuals
Tags: Connection, Fear, Moon, Trangender, Transsexuals, Understanding

Comments: 6 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
Tags: HBS, Science and Culture, Transgender, Transsexuals

Comments: 14 Comments

Loss of A Child: Another Perspective

December 15, 2008

I received the following by email on Friday. I thought it was an excellent follow-up from a different perspective about women losing our children. My friend will go unnamed and unidentified. She has granted me permission to publish her essay here.

I found her letter poignant and very much worth sharing with others.

Her perspective is not yet my own and I count my great fortune for that. Losing children through antipathy to how one must make her way through the world is, perhaps, as devastating in it fashion that losing a child through death. Certainly the losses are terrible to experience. Yet, many women and men of transsexing histories have these experiences. My tendency is to agree with my friend that the experiences are allowed and even encouraged by a transphobic social norm that gives innate “unfit parent” status to anyone who transsexes in all too many jurisdictions.

The pain and heartache seem to be endlessly countable. One after the other I have heard and read such stories as the one below over the past ten years. They are by no means unusual.

The State of New Jersey two years ago changed its anti-discrimination law to cover those who transsex. At least in theory such things as occurred with my friend cannot happen there. Isn’t it time that other states followed? Isn’t it time that the biological reality of such matters as “brain-sex” and a biological basis for transsexuality come into acceptance by our legal systems.

The evidence for biological etiologies grows larger and more broad every week or two as new studies are released and drawn up. Mothers and fathers do not lose their children legally due to Multiple Sclerosis or other conditions like skin-color or physical abnormalities. Isn’t it also time that parents who transsex shoudl be included in the legal protections that maintain their contact and relationships with their children as well?

________________________________

I read your contemplating the loss of a child entry. I don’t have to contemplate that event I lost both of my children when I transitioned. My son, 22, lives about a half mile from me. He would rather drink acid and swallow broken glass than speak with me. Ok, maybe a little overstated but same effect. We haven’t spoken for, well more than a year, and I would estimate more like a few years. Probably since he turned 18 and he told me he would be very uncomfortable if I were to be around when his friends showed up for the party I worked so hard to make sure came together for him. Poor me.Just a fact.

My daughter and I got close to some kind of reconcilliation this past summer but it failed miserably. I think, retrospection, that it was really a cynical attempt by her, doomed to failure. A bit of stage drama to support her position of disconnect. She is 17.

Since the time I was asked to leave the home I built from the inside out, the house they stil live in today, the house we struggled together for, the house that had the blood guts sweat equity, the love in it in every stud, plate and rafter, since I was told to go, my children have acted as though I died.

THey have their Mom. I am just the girl that used to be there Dad. I am never sure how they have it in their heads. I am sure they have it confused. I have the pictures. I have the experiences, I was the one that had them in my arms when they took their first breaths, no, no even before that. I went to every Ob-Gyn visit. I did miss a couple because I traveled for a living. But we started to make sure I could make them and scheduled for them. I was a partner in the process in every way at every stage.

I was the one that held them as they were lifted from their Mom before the docs dumped her uterus onto her belly and then replaced it and closed her up. I held them to her before they sent her unconscious to the recovery room. I walked down the hall with them to the room where they do all the wonderful processing, stick their foot for a blood test, prints, and so on. I held them into the early morning hours while their Mom recovered close by. I would not trade places with her. I saw enough to know it is not for me.

The parenting, yes. That was for me. The carrying and the pregnancy? There was a point in her term that I felt a longing and loss but then the final trimester seemed to tell me that I should not hold onto that longing for too long. It was just another thing in my life , like so many others, that was not for me. But parenting?

Yeah, I bought into it big time and it still haunts me. I have a parenting module that is part of my life but has little to do. I have children but I am a dead person to them. I often think it is not that I have lost my children. They have given me up. And there is at least, tacit approval for that in their Mom’s home. It is maddening because she says she would not want anything more than for reconcilliation for our children and me. But how many ways could she work against it and still try to look, neutral , at least?

Oh poor me. I try not to let myself explore that too much. It is not a good place for me to live in. i know it is a significant blow, and the subject of too many hours of therapy but it is inescapable, ultimately. Many say give it time, time heals all wounds, they are too young, and on and on.

But time cannot recover the nights spent in tears and the overwhelming sense of grief with virtually nothing to do about it, no good play, no move available. These are the kids I stayedup with until they fell asleep night after night, the same kids I awoke and fed, changed, drove all over to get them to schools, events and all that kids do, and all that a parent might do.

Whadja think was gonna happen? I guess I had a different idea. I am led to consider Deidre McCloskey’s experience with her kids. I read her book when it first came out. I thought, whoa, that would never be my experience. I love my kids and they love me. They depend on me. They could never treat me so callously. Then reading again a few years later I thought about how her wife and her children resembled mine so much. More my children than their Mom. WHat had changed in those few years? How could this have happened?

It could only occur with significant support from a trans-phobic society. One that does not support the idea that gender is an experience humans find in all different colors and shapes and sizes and that love is the far more powerful thread that holds things together, more powerful than pressure to conform, or peer approval pressures. No, I didn’t win on that one. Therapist awarded me big points for the argument but in the end it didn’t fly. A part of me died there in those home therapy sessions. I salvaged what I could and let the rest go. A tricky bit of triage but the grief never really leaves. There is some solace in the thought that it is no harder today than yesterday, tomorrow will be about like today, as far as the pain. Pain comes with the territory, suffering is optional.

I believe no one should offer me condolences. I am in pretty good shape despite the dents and marks on my finish. I have had a lot of blessings and they don’t seem to have run out yet. I live in a state of thanksgiving. I just have one thing that causes me real trouble. So many others have a log of things that plague them, some can’t ever put their finger on it but there are lots of its to cause them fits. I know what it is like to lose my children. Those years can never come back to me.
——————–

Categories: Children, Connection, Family, Fear, Gender, Motherhood, Mothering, Transsexuals, Women
Tags: Children, Divorce, relationships, Transsexuals, Women

Comments: 28 Comments

Gaming Therapists, Gaming Ourselves

December 11, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each to her or his own desire.

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

Categories: Communicating, Deception, Mental Health, Psychology, Relationship, Therapy, Transgender, Transition, Transsexing, Transsexuals
Tags: Deception, Gatekeeping, Mental Health, Psychology, Relationship, Transition, Transsexuals

Comments: 22 Comments

Hiding In Plain Sight …

December 10, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Connection, Deception, Fear, Gender, Mental Health, Transsexuals
Tags: Deception, Gender, Lying, Psychology, Relationship, Social Justice, Social Relations, Transsexuals, Zucker-Bailey "Research

Comments: 3 Comments

Where You Go, There You Are

December 9, 2008

I awakend at 5 this morning; the pain from a pinched nerve that had left me aching for almost a week still lingering in my left upper arm. The left shoulder kinked from having slept restlessly, even with the aid of a muscle-relaxer. Muzzy-brained I rose and looked about me, almost expecting a stone-cell like those lived in by the bards in a book I am reading. The cats dozed on the loveseat, looking somewhat askance and upside=down at the woman who’d captured their sleeping spot overnight. “Why are you there?” they seemed to query.

I wondered the same, although the pain in my left arm and shoulder reminded me well enough that the agony of walking the stairs and then trying to lie back in the bed had decided me to sleep last night on the couch. I thought of Nazra asleep in the wide bed upstairs. Ian peacefully dreaming in the room above my head, desperately postponing school until much later. The complex was quiet, our neighbors who’d been rising to leave while the sun was rising somewhere about a third of the way across the Atlantic had finished moving over the weekend. The cold air was still, dark wrapped the complex except for the football stadium-like lights the last leasing agent to buy the place had put-up in the parking lot to “provide safety.” As though, perhaps, the presence of a small Yankee Stadium might keep away the frightening prospect of a rapist or a mugger prowling the parking lots before dawn on a morning where the mercury read 22F.

Yet, in standing on our stoop I saw no one at all. So, perhaps, the ploy works, although I should be surprised if there were more than the zero rapists who’d struck the complex over the past thirty-five years who would be in-wait had the lights been left quiet and demur as they had been a year ago.

I made coffee, sat while the pungent aroma filled the air of the kitchen, awakened me a bit more to this morning. At six I rose and walked the stairs to wake she who ahres my life, making sure that today the alarm wasn’t ignored as she’d told me last night she had a client coming for a session at 7. Watching her safely go to the shower and begin her day I came back down, boiled some eggs and fried some bacon, poured myself a cup of coffee and remembered my friend, Nica, who might worry again over a couple of days without a blog post. After all, she’d told me that the last time i took a break for a few days that she was ready to call and make sure I was alright. I’m fine, my friend, just achy is all.

The concern is touching, as has been that of my partner for the pinched nerve that had grown so excruciatingly painful by the weekend that it had me in tears for much of Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday a trip to the doctor and prescriptions for Flexaril and Naprosyn were given me. I filled them. not wishing to take the Flexaril, knowing its narcotic principles. Yet, last night after five days with only a few hours of sleep I took one and found rest, if not total rest, from the battle for sleep.

Also the past few days I have beenthinking about the toils of women who completed the physical portions of their transition. Over the years I’ve read the responses they’ve had to their new problem: how one finds love without telling the loved one of her history. How one manages to walk through the world when others around her know. It seems that simply changing one’s body may not be enough. I understand that desire: just to test the water and discover if one’s accepted as who they believe they have spent much time changing to. I find it a very natural response to one’s existence. But, it’s never a sure pointer, merely one that if it’s enough to not-know, then is effective.

Humans like to test things. We seem to find a solace in a successful test, although the ones we test with others’ reactions to us are, perforce, unbalanced and show us little in the long-run. Only that people are perhaps more or less inclined to find our new presentation of this self in a new physical form useful to the ways they decline us. Like school-children, sometimes the declensions flow amiss and one hears another use the past subjunctive when they should have used the future subjunctive. It could simply be ignorance of the learner, or a stray mistake, easily made. One who tests the reactions of strangers never usually quite knows what the thought behind their reactions are. One can only imagine given one’s own tendency to read success or failure into her enterprise.

Thus, what another has said in those longish threads of commentary comes to me like a truth flashing for a moment into the light, only to be enclosed once more by darkness and the thoughts of others. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The worrying women, for that is who I’ve read most, appear to be deciding on how radically they will change their lives. If I were to bet today, I’d bet that the attempt will be to move elsewhere, to leave behind most if not every past contact and for the starter to become a starter for real: someone who remakes her life to fit this newish body she wishes to present to the world. It’s done a lot, although one always hopes that she has focused on something other than simply the immediate concerns of “getting through.” Living in a different key is like learning a new piece of music: it requires some work.

Yet, as someone wrote before, long ago: wherever one goes she always takes herself along with her. And myself is always the sum of whom I have been. We don’t actually change very much, we transitioners. We maintain our internal histories, we always know where we came from. Although, for many of us much of our lives and memories come to have the tint at least of the lives we lead now. The memories are not exactly those of the body we once possessed, but are of the changed body, as though it had always been there.

On the face of it that may seem strange to those of you who read this and have never altered the way you’re seen in the world. At least the exterior self: the one who wears make-up every day, the one who went from taking five minutes to getting ready for work to the one who now spends and hour or more “fixing herself.” The changes are not so much of the way, I suspect, that we are, as much as they are the way we wish to be seen. What once we cared not much for and refused to care for now we care for quite a bit more. “Do I look OK?” is probably a common refrain heard inside the homes of those who transition and now present themselves differently than before.

Of course, you do, but you don’t. Inside that mind the memories are still there: memories of the uncertainty of rising, the harsh incongruence between body and soul/mind. We each cope with them differently, or we decline to cope with them at all, maybe. Just wanting it all to be over with. All-too-often we try to make sure it’s “all over with” by changing our lives completely. That is probably something that works in practice much better for a younger self than for one who has spent more than thirty years on the planet. Afterall, less time in service means less to unlearn, less to worry with or to be oblivious to, for the conditioning makes us blind in our lives to all too many acceptances that “come naturally,” to all-too-many “ways of being” we ignore the content of the past made in the images we leave in the present.

We are all generally more than willing to accept that “what I want” takes precedence over “what I am able to do.” Simply because … because what we want is what we want and after all of this “don’t I deserve people to see me for who I am?” For the most part people probably do exactly that. They are much too busy with their own lives, their own troubles, to actually pay very much attention at all to the man or woman who might have walked past them four years ago in a body that appeared to them to be a body of the opposite sex that walks past them now. They never noticed her then and they don’t notice her now, unless they might say to themselves: “what a short guy, or tall, woman.” Otherwise the relative distance and time left to order a mocha vente with a double shot and whipped cream before they have to walk through the doors of the building they work in is much more lilely to be on their minds than the etiology of the person they just passed on the street.

This problem, rather rampant among my friends who have transsexed or are transsexing, seems at the crux of another problem I’ve written about in these pages. The problem of “gatekeeping” the gender divide. That position often falls to various types of therapists: psychologists, psychiatrists, licensed social workers and, in some states and territories, counselors who come by their credentialling through a seminary or a College of Education. One way or another these so-called “gatekeepers” are generally better seen by transitioners as “marks.” Victims of a ponzi-game played in the mind and heart.

It’s a cat-and-mouse game that, I think, is most often played by the transitioner with him or her self. We focus on the outward development, the things we present our interlocutors with in order to “get hormones” and in order “to get surgeries.” Rarely, I find, does the problem arise when someone manages to get a surgery and then changes his or her mind. Regretters, so-called, make-up about 1% or maybe less of those who “change sex.” So, what’s pretty much necessary, it seems to me, is that a person requesting the process of changing sex must simply be found to be competent and not working through the throes of a delusional ideation that encompasses their life. In other words, are they of sound body and mind?

The vast majority of transitioners are of sound body and mind, at least to the extent that they are not delusional. I find it doubtful that that would change much if the entire “gatekeeping” apparatus were to be demolished. Afterall, letters about one’s sanity are readily available with just a few visits to a clinician. That portion of gatekeeping can be kept intact. The endocrinologists and the surgeons then make their own judgements any way about the soundness of their patients. Even with the “gatekeeping” the occasional confused-beyond-all-hope person still manges to rear his or her head and file a lawsuit stating that in some fashion “someone else is to blame” for me doing this to myself.

But then, no “gatekeeping” is required for a person to get a driving license, although a number of suits, a far greater percentage of actual cases of car wrecks than of sex-changes, arise from someone saying they are not at fault and were injured grievously by an accident. To mitigate “fault” is something it seems to me done as well in three visits as in thirty. Why start an intimate and trust-requiring process with that niggly thought that this person holds life-and-death over me?

If the gatekeeping truly maintains social foundations from those misguided enough to have their bodies rearranged by voluntary surgery, then I should think the same would be true on a much greater scale were we to insist on passing a mental health test prior to allowing someone to obtain a driving license. No, the parallel isn’t exact and it’s meant to be cynical, but still, why not? Who knows, perhaps those prone to road-rage or to youthful attempts to work-out angst behind the wheels of cars or the handlebars of motorcycles could be reduced with six months required therapy with a licensed practitioner. I suppose we could establish guidelines and find out at any rate. Especially if we required the practitioner to stand behind her or his evaluation afterwards.

A flippant idea, but an idea nonetheless. Might bear some research just to see its feasibility. Ah, that one rather hits more home than the thought of the former with folks we call cisgendered, no?

As to the sex-change. Well, those tend to bring the results that they are required to bring. But they bring the results to the person who undergoes the process, not so much to the professional who allegedly guides the process. Afterall, it’s rather easy to withhold and guide the therapist where the client wants the process to go. There are tons of literature available in a cursory study that provide someone who’s hellbent on transitioning a guidebook to doing so. Those who live their lives on a whim are, no doubt, capable of discovering ways through the process that are relatively simple. Provided courtesy of those who have basically done the same thing.

By that, I mean those who have gone through a structured process for obtaining a sex-change while not going through, with any motivation, the process of discovering with a therapist the things that actually move and drive them. They manage to keep their deepest secrets secret, their fondest subterfuges and avoidances away from their caregivers, simply because they never actually engage in therapy. Rather, they engage in gatekeeping: they hide from themselves until they begin to realize that they are still somewhat unsatisfied with their lives as they are. Afterall, they aren’t crazy. No, they aren’t; but they may have rather abstruse notions about life in a new key.

Then the very real demons of “How do I look” begin to climb up from the pits they’ve been exiled to. Suddenly, or so it must seem, simply having a new body is not good enough. I need everyone else to tell me how “real” my new body is. It’s ever thus with we humans, I think. We want the deepest answers from others while keeping our own deepest thoughts to ourselves. Ah, but emerge they do. We realize the dread of discovery after the fact. How do I escape that and still know that people accept me for who I am? How can I find out if I am “real?” Surely not from me telling you you are real. But, if you use the process properly rather than as a hurdle you may discover your own “reality” in the process rather than being left “complete” bodily and woefully incomplete emotionally and mentally.

A couple of other ways of discovering my reality after-the-fact are available. One can remake his or her life: find new friends, a new employment, a new loved one and watch the reactions to him or her from the new people they do interact with. Yet, if there is a security clearance or something of the sort a problem can and will arise. You cannot just suddenly spring full-blown into existence. Whatever else was accomplished by the sixties and early seventies radicals in Western cultures one of the major accomplishments was to make it much more difficult to obtain a birth-certificate for a deceased individual and then to make a life under an assumed name. That beginning new ways of tracking people received a huge redo after 9/11/2001.

Computers and vast digital files have superceded the more or less easily breached and taken-advantage-of paper files that littered couthouse basements and storage units at the edges of towns. Beside that there is also the internal fear of being discovered that people hold within themselves. That last fear might have been something worth discussing with a therapist had the transitioner not seen herself or himself as having to run an gauntlet of people out at “all costs” to deny me what I want. There might have been value in discussion of the matters of people who accept the assumptions they have been raised with instead of the easily self-justifying matter of saying, “o, that’s all just surface gloss. If I can find a way to simply change my walk, and the sound of my voice no one will ever know.” Maybe, but we walk in lots of different ways and our talk is harder to change than we might comfortably believe.

Our being constantly “outs” itself. Change isn’t as easily available as some of us think it is when we begin. As I’ve said before, the best results occur with those who take the entire process seriously and who don’t simply go for “gatekeeping” but also go for therapy. Just a simple fact” the process works itself out in ways that go beyond the merely physical. It’s one thing to “say the right” thing on a screen.” It’s an entirely different thing to live into myself.

The fact is, where I go there I am. Very simply put packing my bags and moving 3000 miles away changes very little other than my scenery. My internal knots and my internal pains remains right where I’ve hidden them. If you started transitioning over the past ten or twelve years then the fact remains that very likely somewhere, waiting to be found when you least expect it, is some computer-record that will give you away. And if you find it, or worse, if someone else finds it, then your fragile self-esteem gained from having a rather external source of self-efficacy will disappear as irrevocably as mammaries and ovaries or testes and penises disappeared either in medical waste bags or into one’s own body.

The pinched nerve always can be pinched again. Simply having alleviated it once doesn’t make it unpinchable again for all time. Thus, the problem of walking through the world seem to me internal problems, not external ones so much of the time. Self-discovery and self-esteem are things that must be built prior to surgeries, prior to the “new life” so many think will embrace them once the physical changes are completed. Alas, I don’t find life working that way. Instead one releases his or her inner self constantly in the world. It’s simply there; and if the work hasn’t been done prior to completion, then the chances seem small indeed to think that when the stitches are either removed or melt into the body that one will find, dictu mirabile, that the great surgeon has managed to place them within her or him whilst the patient was unconscious under anasthesia.

In that way the Religious Right is absolutely correct: you will always be who you are. If you haven’t learned to be “yourself,” found the places you are not you but a shadow, a trope, masquerading as a person prior to your final surgery, then you’ll have to go through that process afterwards and probably at the cost of your nerves, your sense of well-being and maybe even your sanity.

It would be nice if, as I’ve heard so often in the field I practice, “bus-therapy” worked. “Bus-therapy” being that type of therapy most often chosen by those who wish to run headlong from their pasts and invent an entirely new self from the whole cloth: one buys a Greyhound ticket from Buffalo to St. Petersburg or LA and hopes that the change of venue will also promote a change in circumstances in one’s life. It’s an easy trap to fall into. I’ve found that it works quite well when one realizes that with bus-therapy the client is usually far away from the practioner for at least a few months. That can be a relief sometimes for the practitioner. But, for the client, they often find that as they unloaded their baggage in St Petersburg some unwanted bags somehow managed to be placed in the luggage compartment of the bus and arrived simultaneously with the traveler, tagged and waiting for pick-up.

Thus, I always suggest that one takes her or his time with the therapy process. Go for the healing available to the self who lived so very long in hiding. Go to discover ways that one can release him or her self safely and truly rather than spending more time hiding one’s self during the discovery process. For to maintain the exact same “hiddenness” is to maintain the exact same problems. A move to Seatlle from Tampa is unlikely to make the change you thought it would, in fact, if you are bent on “no one ever knowing” you’re likely, anymore, to be disappointed and divested of that thought almost immediately.

No, people wil probably not, for the most part, “see” you as your former sex. But they may well “see” you as someone who was oddly given some of the prerogatives of your former sex in the form of the opposite one. In the case of finding work, you may find that your past will follow you now as a matter of course. If your entire self-efficacy is based on “no one ever knowing” then it’s likely to take a rather severe tumble after your move when something “turns up.” Better plan now for something “turning up.” It seems rather likely that it will anymore.

My argument isn’t that “stealth” is impossible. My argument is simply that one do the work beforehand rather than afterwards. It’s more easily done that way, with some guidance and some knowledge-based suggestions from someone you’re investing in to help you find the sticking points in your psyche, your life. Doing so afterwards isn’t impossible, it’s simply implausible given the facts of the existence of one’s self as a human being. Where you go, there you are.

Categories: Psychology, Transition, Transsexing
Tags: Gatekeeping, Transition, Transsexuals

Comments: 7 Comments

Life Runs Counter to Form, Sometimes

December 2, 2008

So, today, yesterday when this is published and you’ll read it, I talked a bit about a flagging interest in internet forums that discuss “trans” issues: from finding a therapist, to having elektro, to seeing an endo, to having various surgeries, to learning to live one’s life in a new register and making one’s way into that comfort level of life where you just “do it:” Nike guys and gals.

So, wouldn’t ya know it. I sorta manage to get button-holed on a different sort of forum (I won’t name it) by someone who’s having her doubts about how to proceed with her life and …. Well, I didn’t turn down the chance to chat with her. I did recommend a couple or three internet forums as being good places to get some input and recommended another friend who hasn’t been too long at her new life for her to contact and possibly discuss some of her questions with.

Thought that would be best simply because, to be honest, sometimes closer is better for pointing out problems and pitfalls that memory may eradicate from the perspective of someone who’s done the deed long ago. The troubles and the elations are a bit closer, more vivid and sometimes all new frames-of reference arise in the years that intervene between times people enter into their endeavors.

But, afterwards, I was thinking how ironic. You write a blog about cutting back and you can’t hold that resolution for eight hours! But, sometimes you probably shouldn’t. Afterall, the person chose you. You didn’t go out looking for them. Whatcha gonna do? Say “go ‘way. I retired from this?” You may, I and others haven’t and probably won’t.

There is something about connecting to someone distant in perspective that not only might help them, but can definitely help you. To restore and revive memory is generally not a negative thing, although many of us, human beings that is, have memories we aren’t always willing or able to call-up from the places they are stored. Pain and trauma memories among the most prevalent such memories.

It strikes me that internet paths have been extraordinarily valuable to those of us who grew up away from the stories of Christine Jorgenson and other women, and men, of transsexed histories. Who came to adulthood enclosed in our own torments and who were told, again and again, “what you say cannot be true. It’s impossible.”

Now through the agency of the internet many more troubled folk actually have access to information and persons have gone through those processes. There are clearinghouses such as Andrea James’ at TS Roadmap that can form very valuable bases for those seeking to understand themselves. Internet Forums abound where possible transitioners can find women and men who have “gone before” who are able to give personal stories, relate experiences among the myriad gender-therapists and endocrinologists they have used.

Good and helpful women like Dr. Rebecca Allison have collected lists of therapists and surgeons from the world over to be there as resources and idea-starters for folk who once were simply alone with their doubts and fears. There are ways and there are legitimate researches that do not involve the psycho-theorizing of the CAMH/Northwestern alliance of psychologists and psychiatrists who have. for years, dominated the study of what we call transsexuality.

Much of that research has been done in Europe at Amsterdam and Goettingen, although more is now being done at American places too like UCLA, Chicago, NYU and Harvard. Recently UCLA and Prince Henry Institute in Melbourne, Australia released a preliminary report on a study just completed by researchers of those two institutions. The day seems to be coming more swiftly than ever before that will discover that transsexing people are natural and legitimate human beings who do not have psychiatric disorders that make us feel and say the things we feel and say about our deepest selves.

There are even a women scientists, several, in fact, Joan Roughgarden, Julia Serano and Zoe Brain, to name three, who study and evaluate these new researches and spread the word across the Web so it can be discussed and provided to people with transsexing histories.

Of course there are the lists of activists, thinkers and writers listed in the blogroll here who provide invaluable resources for discovery and changing the way society deals with us. The world seems that much smaller. The loneliness appears that much less when people are able to make connections with one another. There’s no need anymore to try to struggle through all alone, when there are friends or acquaintances as close as the keys on a keyboard, as instantaneous as DSL and other technologies can make them.

Internet Forums can provide fertile areas for chatting with others, for gaining some insight into possibility and having others “bounce” ideas off of another to help her or him to at least find they are not alone. Others have passed this way before. Although one life usually doesn’t look very much like another, there are still similarities that can be weighed and thought through with the help of others who have spent much more time than the new discoverer of how and why folks take the steps they take. They provide people with the chance to feel, anyway, that they are not alone and just “plain crazy.”

Much has changed in the past fifteen years. More change is on the way.

Change is, perhaps, our most frightening experience in life. We prefer to fall into patterns and actions that take the form of a simple rote whereby what we can expect tomorrow will be much like what we experienced today. Alas, life doesn’t work that way. But in the face of the fact, panta rhei, it can be very comforting to have virtual hands and virtual hearts that symbolize the persons who actually live and work, move and feel, at the other ends of the currents that connect us.

I’m grateful to that person who curiously reached out to me yesterday afternoon. She’s reminded me of something very, very important: that I, like the rest of you, have a charge to keep. The charge is to not turn away and hide oneself from the appeals of those who haven’t found yet the way to begin this journey of life. They only need a few minutes and the value of those minutes can be as much your own as they can be of value to the person who stops you to enquire.

So, I will do my writing, the creative sort, but will also try to maintain this blog and even drop in on some of those forums. I’ll also continue to answer questions, like the one’s I got yesterday. Community is available to us. It’s simply a matter of reaching out through these wires and currents and discovering it.

Categories: Connection, Transition, Transsexing, Transsexuals
Tags: Connection, Internet, Transition, Transsexuals, TS Forums

Comments: 4 Comments

Occasionally

December 1, 2008

Occasionally, I think about why and where, when and how, who and what. Today is one of those occasions.

Who determines who else partakes in our lives? So often we give ourselves over to chance and circumstance. I believe we give destiny too much credit for what we do not otherwise have the perspicacity to understand and connect as cause and effect.

I grew up sheltered in so many respects. After a time, fearful to swim into the deep relational water of humanity’s ocean I gave into my own fear. I withdrew to a room where I read: Anne of Green Gables (feel in love with Nova Scotia,) Little Women and Eight Cousins, stuck on the adventuresome nature of Jo and wondered why I could not seem to be more like her. So easily free of the fears, I thought, that chained my own life.

Alone, so very often, in my room I read and wandered into other realms. I read books by Sam Delaney and Harlan Ellison, and then Tolkien. The poetry of Yeats and John Clare, William Blake and Emily Dickenson enchanted me.

So with friends. Lately the entire way I discover people has changed. Open and feeling rather free to simply be myself I find friends come to my hand now, after years of hiding myself away. Strangely, the friends and I hold passions in common, or a particular way of viewing the world. The freedom is to be oneself, not the cowering hidden soul crushed by doubt and fear.

A snatch of conversation overheard and an introduction I would never have attempted just eight years ago.

I’ve learned a willingness to be vulnerable at times. A willingness to launch that ocean journey on a brig trusting to the sea to bring me ashore in a piece rather than scattered among the reefs and rocks, food for tiny iridescent fishes and scuttling crabs.

The brig has yet to founder or run-aground. The cost of voyaging has been simply my fear and the freshness of allowing my own vulnerability to be clear rather than hidden.

There are places I do not go. I needn’t. My history fits rather nicely into that of “just another woman in the world.” No lies are necessary, and so, aren’t told. The truth of being oneself trumps those concerns I have read of for many years now. The key: to speak the heart and allow it to be there for others to see, or not, as they choose.

It is simply a matter of choosing whether to take the heading I have been taught, or the heading that presents itself in authenticity and relationship. What I think I have seen on BBs today and in the past is the overwhelming fear of a truthful honesty, one that presents the reality of the soul rather than the reality of the ways we are taught to think. Arguments over Truth are for those who require a constant guidebook on honesty and integrity. Sometimes those are only for people who read a how-to book on life and love, feeling and responsibility.

I cannot change another’s truth, and she or he must live that out as best they are able. My truth is that I am who I am. I must give way to the truthfulness of who Radha is and was, not some vague platitude that one size fits all. It is not a venture for everyone. Each one’s truth is separate from me. Live it as best you may. And go with the blessings of Mother.

My truth is this: yesterday the beehive huts on the Irish coast. Today, the wattled home of a priestess at Kildare, building a fire that brings light and warmth to a dwelling. Tying together stalks of herbs and grasses to freshen the interior air, dressing to go and tend Bridget’s fire. The difference is the difference in the west and the east/center of a very small island. Here, for me, the air is fresher.

Is it ever enough to parse and stretch and to make what I wish to be there there? I think that there is no end to that path, an endless wandering through blankness and the death of memory.

I cannot change what I recall. Would I could and make it different. Make a story I would truly enjoy, every minute of. But there is much that cannot be enjoyed, unless one thinks of it as a way toward learning.

All those pithy little adages, like “No pain, no gain.” No doubt coined by a football coach, drill-sergeant or someone who was born on third and thought she had hit a triple in life.

Some do. More power to them. Both those who hit triples against all odds and those who are born on third and think they have hit triples.

We start where we start and go on from there. Some things go well and other things go poorly. Remind me of that in a few weeks after four more papers and a major exam. Remind me of that when I trot off to take the national exam. *sigh*

But, better all that than four endless hours, or years and years of denying oneself the very right to exist.

I’ve truly enjoyed reading what others write at various forums. Yet, I often think that internet bulletin boards are frequented mostly by those of us who are, or were, lonely. We are lonely for a while and then don’t notice when we no longer are. Our behavior continues to draw us into it although the circumstances that made such behaviors a good and valuable response to our world have changed into a different pattern. But our lives do not change to match the changed circumstances.

The old ways of acting no longer provide what they once did. Or we remain stuck in behaviors that no longer repair us. They no longer bring congruence to what had been loneliness.

Life is full. My sorrows are just like most of yours, bearable with beginnings, middles and ends. At least until the next batch arrive. But, they also have those beginnings, middles and ends. Seems like life goes that way. Go with it.

Yesterday I began a short-story, but had no time except to jot down a few opening paragraphs before my partner and I took a road-trip up the Delaware almost to the end of the Water Gap. We passed through rain that turned to sleet and snow, gloried in a drab and gray day that allowed, for the time and place, me to work out some of the way I feel the story will go.

I plan to work on it. Hopefully can serialize it in this space. For me, it’s probably more important than anything I have placed here before. Why? It’s important because the story tells me a truth about myself. It tells me a couple of truths about myself. One is that the story itself tells me a truth just in the way it moves. The other major truth is that in writing it I will write in the way I would rather write: no polemics, no suggestions, simply a weaving of language to make color and character.

When it’s done, I hope you’ll like it for, I believe, it will be in so many ways truer than anything I have yet given you. But, be forewarned. The story isn’t biography. It’s a story only, it will be, maybe in some fashion, a biography of the soul. For me that seems far more important than the writing of thoughts about the life of women and men who have transsexing histories. For, when we come down to it, agitation, diatribes, political and social ideals, even psychology are lesser lights to the truth available through the telling of stories.

Categories: Connection, Language, Transsexuals, Writing
Tags: A New Turn, Connection, Language, Transsexuals, Writing

Comments: 5 Comments

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
Tags: Allies and Friends, Co-operation, Connection, Social Relations, TDOR Update, Transgender, Transsexuals

Comments: 1 Comment

Hand Me A Quaalude, I’m Much Too Happy!

November 26, 2008

One of the first things I do in the morning is … well, get up … kiss the partner and snuggle some, then wake-up my son so he can get ready for school. Only this morning he woke us up! He was already mostly dressed: “Mom, where’s some winter pants?” “Folded in the laundry-room, Ian.” He never seems to realize that the clothes don’t just appear in the drawers and closets without some human assistance.

Then I travel down to the kitchen and start the coffee and, lately, the oatmeal (Ian refuses that in favor of whatever chocolate or graham cracker cereal he prefers that morning.) Afterwards there’s a fish to feed, a dog to feed and take out for a short walk, and then I release my loves for days at work and school. Afterwards the first place I go is usually my email account where Slate, WaPo, Huffington, Bilerico, Pam’s House Blend, and Alternet are on feeds.

I read, then usually write before getting out of the house. Writing, you know, is VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS! Yep, I usually make sure to put on my serious face before writing, simply because I don’t wanna leave you readers fluff every day to waltz through and say, “Gosh, she certainly is upbeat and syrup-y. She on some sort of anti-depressant or mood stablizer?”

To come and write with happiness or joy would seem, almost, to be to fall into one of those categories of blog that ya just cannot take very seriously, wouldn’t it? I mean, ya know the kind, “O, I dreamed last night of fluffy sheep and I’m just everso excited that my baby’s cutting her first tooth or I just love life” kinda renditions of the world as the best possible of all worlds. Hardly the serious things that would be of interest to my readers!

I mean, already I sometimes get chided for not being “serious” enough. “Hey girl, doncha realize that Obama is gonna appoint Hillary as Secretary of State and we’re gonna be swamped again with Clintons?” Or, as has happened in the past “what a moron, you just don’t get how serious a matter this is.”

So, today, still mulling over a conversation I had at Facebook last night with a younger transitioner, thinking I might find something in that discussion I could latch onto and write about, I instead called up the Alternet feed and there, at the top, was a piece cross-posted from Red Room.

A fellow (former) Nashvillian, Tim Wise, has analyzed to some extent the leftie version of being all-too-serious about the supporters of the President-elect. The piece makes a lot of good reading and since my younger chat-mate last night has this tendency to be both definitely right-wing and rather seriously into what they think of as “fun” (ya know, kinda a David-Letterman-chic irony and sarcasm, an on-the-edge-of-death sort of ennui?) the work of Mr. Wise struck a chord. I’d suggest you political-types who read here follow that link and read his essay. It is quite good and quite to the point.

Life has those moments, doesn’t it? Things fall apart, you hear or read one too many whines or worries about “what is this gonna be like? The guys seem to ignore me. Life is hell.”) and you realize that you have fallen into this pattern that requires widow’s-weeds and ashes strewn liberally about the house and your clothing and you wonder: why the hell am I happy?

I mean, let’s face it, girls and guys, life, maybe especially when you’ve either a history of or are wanting a history of transsexing, simply is a very HARD THING. Women are still treated in all sorts of subtle and flagrant ways as if we are second-class human beings, trans-women are as well, the Right consistently wants to do away with homosexuality and trans-ness of all sorts, cars wreck, phones get disconnected because the money for the bill wasn’t paid, the price of gas has fallen precipitously and on top of it all, damn, the weather has turned very cold up here in the depressed Northeast.

So, I called a guy in Trenton and asked, he’s that kinda guy ya know, if he didn’t have something to bring me down. Would he deliver it here? — OK, I really don’t know anyone anymore who sells drugs of any kind except for the nice people in Portland, OR who fill my scripts, the guys down at the local CVS and, as a matter of fact a pharm-tech I’ve interacted with on the Webz . But, heck, should I really be able to get up in the morning and feel pretty good about life? Isn’t there something plainly wrong with a picture that includes joy? Maybe I should still know someone who delivers!

Perhaps I’ve just fallen a bit too deeply in-love with Matthew Vaughn’s, Stardust. Catherine and I bought that last week and I’ve watched it three times since, enjoying the delightful story of a young man who jumps a wall and enters a world on the other side he never imagined existed. He even meets and gets to know a star! No, not just Michelle Pfeiffer or Robert DeNiro (who also have major parts in the picture,) but a real-live star. Ok, she’s really Claire Danes, but, what the heck, she falls from the sky and the young man meets her on the other side of the wall. OK, she plays a star. Kinda funny, no? A star playing a star?

Anyhow, the movie’s fun and romantic and fantastic and just plain ole good. (Tell me again why we didn’t see it in the cinema, please.) It calls up in me feelings of calm and, dare I say it? H-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s.

Shhhhhhhh. Be serious, Radha. No one is gonna give you the time-of-day if you continue this way!

But really now, aren’t there positive things, things we love in our lives, even in the midst of struggle and disappointment? O sure, it might be rather nice to see all sorts of radical changes that an Obama government would bring to the country: full-rights for everyone, a real economy rather than the paper-doll one we’ve labored with for the past thirty years, new faces in Washington to truly wash away the pundits and the same tired faces we got tired of listening to through the Reagan years, the Bush I years, the Clinton years and, o-yes-please, the Bush II years?

Wouldn’t it be nice if Fred Phelps managed to discover the one verse in the Bible he appears to have never read: Mark 12:31? How about if only the government could actually work in such a way that there’d be something embracing and truly good about this “city on a hill” land we live in?

I know there are a lot of bad things that happen in people’s lives. I’ve even experienced a lot of those myself. I know that we get hurried and pressed and the various factions of the LTBG can be at odds with one another over a plethora of important causes and concerns. I do, really, understand that if our cultures continue on the way we have gone for the past thirty years that some rather nasty climatological changes are going to bring suffering and destruction and that most of our corporate honchos don’t care or try to find ways to make it all seem like some nasty propaganda mailed-out from the desk of Al Gore in order for him to cop a Nobel Prize and to scare the bejesus outta all the rest of us for some nefarious left-wing plot, Matt Drdge tells me so! Bill O’Reilly does too! I mean, what greater authorities are there?

Wars, rumors of wars, young’uns no longer respectful of their parents, trash tossed outta car windows and left to blow or linger along roadsides and through yards, young males of Caucasian, Hispanic and African heritages blowing-away one another in the cities, crumbling infra-structure and falling housing markets and, truly aghast at this, a stock-market that claims to prop-up everything gnashing it’s collective teeth as prices fall, rebound and fall further. *sigh* O my Goddess! was that a piece of sky that just conked me on the head!

Hand me a quaalude, please, I’ll eat it with my toast and coffee.

No don’t!

Instead I am just gonna feel good today. Who cares what the mechanic says? Who cares if the rent’s not paid or the toilet overflows, or the garbage-truck manages to drop the entire four loads from the dumpsters just across the parking lot? Who cares if the world has already gone to Hell (that ain’t gonna happen, but 87% of the folk in the USA believe something similar to that according to Gallup.) My goodness! We can be real goof-balls can’t we?

Ya know what I really want today? To find some way that I can get my hair to shine the way Claire Danes’ hair shines in Stardust. For a glow like that, I’d be more than willing to fall outta the sky and make a crater and have to limp around for awhile from the after-effects of the fall.

Or, maybe, it’s just time to take the good with the bad. — I seem to be overwhelmed from taking the bad with the good.

O, and have a nice day. 🙂 *hug*

NOTE: I was privileged to read a really lovely letter this morning from my friend’s, Abby, blog. Here’s the link. Who I Am and Why I Do What I Do. I found it loving and moving and hope you’ll click on the link and read it. Thanks, Abby.

Categories: Barack Obama, depression, Feeling Good, Hearts and Minds, Love, Politics, Psychology, Transsexuals
Tags: Enjoyment, Leftist whining, Life, Red Room.com, Romance, Transsexuals

Comments: 3 Comments

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To A T

Posted tagged ‘Transsexuals’

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

Loss of A Child: Another Perspective

Gaming Therapists, Gaming Ourselves

Where You Go, There You Are

Life Runs Counter to Form, Sometimes

Occasionally

Hand Me A Quaalude, I’m Much Too Happy!

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