Just Jack

“That wasn’t a girl.  That was just Jack.”

New York Times, 11 November 2009

 

Yeah, I want more, have always wanted more.

I don’t want to be a solitary outcast freak.

I wanted to be one of the girls.  Still do.

But I believe that’s a bit much too ask.

So all I can be is just Callan, and that’s gotta be enough.

Better than being beaten into silence, eh?

BrainBlob

I know that the way my brain works isn’t typical, though I’m not quite sure what typical means.   After all, typical and type have the same root, and there may well be many types of brains, which means my brain is typical, just not the most common type, whatever that means.

I went through this brain difference stuff years ago when examining myself and “attention deficit disorder” or ADD.   ADD is definitely a misnomer; all people defined as ADD are capable of what they call hyper-attention, the ability to become so attentive that they become lost in time.   The deficit is not in attention, but rather in attention as it is defined in specific settings, like schools, where attention to the mundane is required.

In other words, our brains are different from the typical brain, although I’m not quite sure what typical means.

My mother tells the story of being invited to observe in Miss Hansen’s fifth grade classroom.  Miss Hansen and I were often at loggerheads.  She didn’t like the style other teachers had tolerated or even encouraged, which included me helping other students.   She wanted the attention she wanted, not the challenge.

The day my mother came, Miss Hansen was teaching some mathematical concept.  She called me up to the front of the class and wrote an equation on the board, asking me to solve it.

My mother understood that I was supposed to fail to solve it, so Miss Hansen could then go on to teach the concept.

Problem was that I didn’t care what I was supposed to do.

I just solved the equation, using the concepts I already had to work it through.  We “concept formers” were always trouble.

This meant, noted my mother, that I then needed to sit in my chair for thirty minutes while Miss Hansen taught the other kids a concept that I already owned.  Actually, she probably just taught them a process; the concept would come later, if it did.

My favourite model of ADD comes from a fellow named Thom Hartmann who took a kind of sociobiological approach.

If there were so many people with this ADD thingy, he reasoned, there must be some benefit, or it wouldn’t have stayed in the population so long and so broadly.

What might the benefit be to this kind of mind?

Farmers need a kind of routine attention, regular and constant, to attend to crops.

Hunters, on the other hand, need very focused and intense attention to “think like the prey.”

Maybe it’s just that some of us have brains that best suit farming while others have brains that best suit hunting.

That made sense to me.

It’s not that my brain is defective, it’s just that it isn’t typical farmer.

In my case, what I hunt is concepts.  I like the connections, the threads and the words (symbols) we use to communicate those concepts.

Some people say that House MD loves puzzles.  I find that construction a bit off.  After all, he is not a crossword expert, or into anagrams.

No.  To me, anyway, House loves connections.  He loves finding out how things are connected, and then testing those connections to see how they change under stress.  It’s not about some constructed puzzle with a solution, it’s about connected organisms and where the connections are disrupted or twisted.

Now, that view of a fictional character undoubtedly tells you more about me than about him, me seeing my own challenges in his (constructed) behaviors.

I see autism as the effects of a brain that has limited flexibility.   That rigidity may have corresponding benefits, like the ability to go deep and intense into specific areas.

I don’t quite see my own brain that way.  I do know that I am more sensitive than others to many things — that I have lower levels of “latent inhibition,” less ability to slough off hurts –  and that I carry my history like a yoke.  One fellow said that a key indicator he identified for success was if people could move beyond their own history.  That makes sense to me: the believer is happy, but the doubter is wise, said the Hungarians, and being able to always believe in the next possibility is the basis for much American success.

I just think that brains have conceptual structures & habits, and learning to make the most of the gifts you have, even if some categorize those gifts as deficits, is very important to self-actualization.

Brains are odd things.  I just saw a blogpost that asked if you, as a transperson, could change your brain to match your body, would you do it?  For me, it’s hard to imagine that, because I am my brain, not my body.  I see things the way I am, and my vision is limited to and colored by the current shape of my brain.   I just wouldn’t be me if my brain were different (which might not be a bad thing), but I do know I would be me even if my body were different.  Might a different body continue to reshape the wetware of my brain?  Sure.  But that is about time and process, change by living in the world, not about bang-bang brain change.

I get why people like to have concepts that they can use to help tell others how they are different.  And I get why, in the medical creation myth world, those concepts now come as diagnoses, rather than, say, discussions of the different spirit guide who animates you.   Today others are supposed to respect diagnoses even as they dismiss spirit stories.

I just like concepts that empower better than concepts which pathologize.

But heck, I guess that’s just me.

Savant

My sister is into the whole Aspie thing, and she likes this website where an author gives you tables of Asperger’s characteristics as seen in females (one, two.)

Problem for me is that so many of these things seem like what a magician calls a “cold read.”  I can say that “You have two hands, one of which you use a lot more than the other,” or “few people really understand you,”  or “you have had difficulties in finding love,” and virtually everyone will agree.   The classic experiment where students fill out a form, then get a computer printout of about themselves and find it very accurate, only to discover that many other people got the same printout and found it accurate, well, that’s an example.

Problem with these tables is that there is no comparison to a non-Aspergers sample, so these anecdotal lists, so much fun to make in a workshop, do not eliminate what is also common to the population at large.  For example, doesn’t almost everyone have a collection of something, somewhere?

The sweeping thing I see is that women who identify themselves as having Aspergers also identify themselves as separate from the masses, and identify connecting with other people as a distinct performance that wears them out, rather than something that comes “naturally.”   Other people just connect, but “we” have to work at it.

I get that, and I really get how that is an appealing identity factor.  “They just connect, but I am separate.”

Problem is that I suspect everyone does performance on some level.

To me, the key difference seems to be the level of awareness of that performance, the heightened sense of being an observer.

I understand this completely.  I am not good at smalltalk; I want to talk about something, not nothing.  In the bar, TBB said that the bartender was sure she belonged there, but wasn’t sure that I did.  I agreed.  I didn’t belong there, drinking and chatting, didn’t fit in, didn’t belong there.  It was boring and not-fun to me to just go through the same old pantomime of social discourse.  Yawn.

But I’m not sure that key difference places me with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.  Though I am sure that schools have an interest in defining kids like me as sick, to be treated; so much easier to herd the herdable rather than the heavy observers.

I have used the word “too” people to describe people like me.   My father’s inability to take “yes” for an answer is a key mark in my understanding of him with Asperger’s.  He can’t hear agreement or hear questions, but rather needs to play out his own idea over and over. And my mother’s physical clumsiness along wiher her lack of empathy for others (“I don’t care about anyone else. I only care about me,” as she said to me when I tried to move her out of the way of others in the junk store) are also clues.

But is feeling more observer than participant really a clue to autism, any more than having some kind of stomach gripes (“90% have them!” says the table.)?

I’m not convinced.  And a list of shared experiences doesn’t help convince me.

But I do agree that those people who don’t just fall into the crowd and into unconsidered social ritual are more interesting to me.

To me,  the essence of what how humans communicate is performance, either habitual or considered.

I just like considered better.

Out Of Asperger’s

My life has been, the way I see it today, a journey out of Asperger’s.

Asperger’s syndrome is an “autism spectrum disorder,” where Dr. Asperger tried to describe the commonality between patients he saw; hyperfocused, lack of empathy, and mostly having trouble in social situations.

The symptoms are not clearly diagnosed, which is one reason why there is a current move to remove the diagnosis from the DSM.

It’s been a few years now since I started looking at Asperger’s, after one of my brother’s adopted kids was diagnosed.  In looking at the symptoms, I saw my father very clearly: “active but odd.”

Since Asperger’s has been called “manhood on steroids,” and 75% of the diagnoses go to men, it’s often hard to see the behaviors in women.

But in looking at my mother led me to the conclusion that she also has signs.  I suspect that my parents saw similar challenges in each other, and that’s why they hooked up.

I sent the New York Times article linked above to my sister, and it piqued her interest.  She started looking at it, and decided that Asperger’s made sense of her social challenges, especially at work.

So there we have my father and my mother, whose choices I see as fitting the Asperger’s model, and my sister, who sees her choices that way.

And then there is me.

It has long been clear to me that my brain doesn’t work the way other people’s do.   I have the early behaviors that worried my mother, like being outside in the cold without a coat or abandoning classmates I brought home to play, and the later behaviors, where I don’t fit well.   Social has never been part of this family; today I am disconnected just as my parents are, being constrained into their world as a caretaker in way too many ways.

My journey to self-awareness and actualization, such as it is, has been about how my mind works in the world.  Sure, I have had to understand myself and my own process, but that has been impossible without understanding my relationship to my family.  First in that, of course, is my role as caretaker or worse from my earliest days, but more is the way I tried to create my persona by modeling from my parents.  I tried to find solutions for my own challenges by following their lead, and their lead, well, it was heavily influenced by Asperger’s and the corresponding social challenges.

I didn’t separate from my parents in a useful way, and a large part of that was the massive and overwhelming need for support and companionship that came from their inability to create normative social networks.  I felt obligated to care for them, and in doing that, I sacrificed my own life, my own vigor, my own possibilities, my own health.

Sure, I have my own mental challenges in connecting with people.  My biggest challenge is staying observer and not slipping into the spirit of the crowd.  That observer role, though, reveals that I am not that deep in Asperger’s behaviors, as people with Asperger’s have trouble getting past their own stuff when watching others.  For me, though, not being able to trust the emotional responses of my parents meant that I had to closely monitor them, so I learned how to watch the little details and understand how the patterns fir together.

It also meant that I had to learn to monitor and control myself.  I had emotions as a kid, but I was constantly being told that they were stupid, that I was stupid.  “Stupid” was my name in the family, at least until I was twelve and the shrink told them to cut it out.  I learned to use my sharp brain to monitor not only others but also myself, and also to try to control both myself and others until Christine helped me break that behavior in the 1980s.

Whatever my own brain differences are, and there is no doubt to me that my brain doesn’t just “work like everyone else’s,” Aspergers has shaped my life and continues to do so.  Since I am only really in relationship with three people, and now that my sister has self identified, all three can be seen as being in line with Asperger’s behaviors, my life is constrained by Asperger’s.

My parents cant respect personal boundaries even if they are hit over the head with them, and I should know; I have hit them over the head many times.

My sister has challenges with empathy and entering emotional states.

And all of them need and crave routine in a way that makes me loathe to create the changes I need to move on with my growth process.  They bridle at change or demands, so for the past half century I have been bridled with them.

And I don’t see any way out of Asperger’s.

Specificity

In his “My Life In Comedy,” Garrison Keillor makes the point that while existentialism, doom and bleakness are universal, easily seen in the aggregate, happiness is very specific, only seen in the details of any moment.

If you want to explore happiness, you have to explore specific moments, specific details and move away from generalization.

I read a story in the New York Times about the plans to end the specific diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, and instead categorize it as one of the Autism Spectrum Disorders.  How do people survive the declassification of their identity label?

Dr. Susan Swedo of NIH is quoted as saying ““People say that in autism, everybody is a snowflake. It’s the perfect analogy.”

Okay, sure.

But isn’t every human a snowflake?

I mean Mr. Rogers was telling me I was special and unique since 1962 (and in Canada, no less.)

In the end, queer liberation is about the simple idea that “everybody is a snowflake.”

Does that make Mr. Rogers queer empowering?

Sure.  He wanted you to be the best you can be, and wanted others to listen and engage your specialness.

Our power isn’t in some overarching group identity model.

It’s in the specifics of our unique lives.

And as Garrison Keillor notes, that’s where our happiness is, too.

Ate The T-Shirt

Been there, done that, ate the t-shirt, as the amazing Lindsay used to say.

I’ve been thinking about the challenges in transwoman performance, and I realize I have already done this work.

In 2002 I said that the most difficult thing about trans is negotiating other people’s fears.   The idea that somehow, because we are the phobogenic object, what people fear, that we have the obligation to negotiate other people’s fears is just impossible.

On the local list, a crossdresser just wrote that it’s hard to be trans, but it is a thousand times more difficult to be the spouse of a transperson.

Huh?  Do they have a lifetime of stigma?  Do they have zillions of impossibly hard choices?  OK, sure, they get it in more like one lump sum, and they get less benefit from us coming out than we do, but a thousand times more difficult?   No.  It’s just that we want to take care of others more than we want to take care of ourselves, and being trained as men, we especially want to take care of women.

Problem is that stops us from seeing ourselves and other transpeople as women, and that’s a huge loss.

I wrote about that big cleft in 1999, The Guy-In-A-Dress Line.

It’s funny reading Femulate; Lana is so clearly coming to trans, but her model, that the best people born male can do is emulate females (femulate) leads her to such binaries.  She has to identify people like Christine Jorgensen as men so she can say “He femulated,” when clearly Christine identified as a woman.  But Lana needs to defend that line to hold onto being a man for her wife, who won’t see her as trans.

I don’t want to be a man in men’s clothing.  “People who see you as a man must think ‘Oh, what a weird guy!’” TBB told me last week.

And I don’t want to be a man in women’s clothing.  In many ways that is even worse, because to pass as a tranny the defenses have to be even more defined.

TBB wanted to give my sister a break because “they are emotional, and have come to express emotionally.”   “But you are strong,” TBB tells me.  To her, that means I can’t be emotional, because that makes me “defensive,” and what is worse than being “defensive?”  Lots.

Problem is that the they vs. us paradigm leaves me out of woman.  Bite that.

The fear swells, so we hang onto our assigned gender, and then feel as constrained as men-in-dresses, which we hate.

How do we claim our own gender, especially in the face of so many who want birth genital status to be final, even so many who also identify as trans?

How do we jailbreak?

In my old writings, I find great descriptions of the problems.

The solutions, though, well, not so clear.

But I take heart in the words of a transfan who works with TBB.

“You did all this to become a woman.  So be one.”

Shuckin’ & Jivin’

Sometimes, it was difficult to be a black person in the south.

So some black people developed a kind of role to be adopted in the presence of threatening people that played into stereotypes of blacks being stupid & lazy, while simultaneously offering ironic humour to other blacks around.

The roles combined the appearance of deference with the secret language of the oppressed to code multiple layers of meaning.

This performance was called shuckin’ and jivin’, and has long been held with ambivalence in the black community.

For example, starting in the 1920’s Lincoln Perry created the character Stepin Fetchit,  “the laziest man in the world,” playing out this schuckin’ and jivin’.   Was he just carrying on old stereotypes, or was he subverting them, honoring the survival strategies black people created to handle a living world of oppression and racism without losing their wit?  The debate goes on.

Maybe, we of the trans population need to think about the survival strategies we employ to handle living in a world of oppression and heterosexism without losing our wit.

TBB says that she just wants to be seen as normal in the world, and that’s the same as all her transsexual friends.

To me, that says that they all feel limited by the survival strategies — by the survival performance — that they feel forced to adopt.

These strategies may fall into categories, but in the end, we each build our own survival performance, our own version of schuckin’ and jivin’ that fits our needs.

We build these performances out of standard expectations, but tailor them to our own personality.

We may take a bit of “dragface,”  the “I only do it for the show” idea, and mix it with some “WBT,” the whole “I had a birth defect and now I am cured.”   Throw in some “HetCD,” where we only dress to play, and some “gender queer,” the idea that my expression is rebelling against authority, and you get another kind of performance.

Others offer the “off the grid” performance, just being out of time, while some just are rich enough to get away with “eccentric.”

For me, I knew the cost of being visible as trans in the world is the cost of adopting and maintaining my own survival performance.  And I have done that enough to know the limits of such a performance, the cost of being not seen as normal in the world.

Our survival performances give us the cover we need to walk in the world as transpeople, but they also limit us, crippling our freedom of expression and of claiming.

They free us and they hurt us.

And that’s why, I think, we need to understand them rather than just to wear them as shells that are somehow real.

Fun Defenses, Powerful Defenslessness.

So, you may have met the glib, charming TBB, who loves to talk to the other people at the bar, strike up conversations with passerby, and always chat with service staff.

But do you know the secret TBB, whose secret identity is still set as a model railroader (HO and Super-O gauge) and wants to create a hermit hideaway on a tract of land her uncle used to own in the Catskills?

Probably not.

That TBB, who even as she preens in the mirror in a new halter top cocktail dress and new jeweled heels, thinks she is just not pretty, well, that TBB is kept well hidden.   So well hidden, in fact, that TBB chooses not to write, in case someone else catches a glimpse of her.

TBB identifies with what she sees in so many transsexual women she knows: she just wants to be able to be seen as normal.

She doesn’t want to always have to walk around in armor, defended, always being the one who has to be big and gracious even as other people see her and fear her.  After all, they know that she is powerful enough to do what would scare the hell out of them, walking away from their group identity to claim individual expression.

It was in a workshop fifteen years ago now that I explained how it felt to see the fear in someone’s eyes when they saw me, as they thought “If this person is disconnected from social control enough to walk into here in a dress, what else are they capable of?”

A therapist who works with transpeople opened her eyes wide.  “That’s it!” she said.  “That’s why people are scared of transwomen.  I never thought of that before.”

In 1994, TBB and I did a skit about two transpeople driving to a meeting.  We both played out our fantasies and our defenses in a concentrated way.  She was glib with everyone, and I had to explain everything.

Things may have changed in 15 years, but not much.  Defenses are defenses.

As ACIM tells us, though, your power is in your defenslessness.

I told that to TBB.  She got it on a spiritual level, but on a practical level, when I suggested new strategies, she needed to tell me how she had tried them in the past and they had caused problems.

Yeah.  We don’t have defenses because we didn’t need them, because we didn’t found out that they worked.   Our defenses are there for a purpose, tried and true.

Problem is that every time we build a wall to protect ourselves, we also build a wall that blocks potential connection.

Your power is in your defenselessness.

Eeew, that sounds horrible.

TBB doesn’t want to always have to walk around in armor, defended, always being the one who has to be big and gracious even as other people see her and fear her.

That just sucks, for her and all the transwomen she knows.

But how do we trust that we can be naked and vulnerable and people won’t get all freaked out, all weird and nasty, acting out?

After all, all it takes is one person who feels blessed by their church to attack the immorality of queerness to do a hell of a lot of damage in our lives, causing us a lot of pain.

Transpeople, well, as I have said many times before, maybe we can most easily be categorized and grouped by the defenses we choose, and not the identities that we claim.

And our power is in in getting out from behind our defenses, in that final trans surgery, pulling the stick from our own ass.

But God, that is so hard.

Pet Nomenclature

On the local list, the moderator defined someone as a “genetic woman.”

That baffled me.

I might know what a “genetic female” is, assuming they meant “chromosomal female,” someone with XX chromosomes.  Of course, there are some women out there who have lived their lives as women and are not XX, but that’s a small number.

To me, though, woman is a gender term and female a biological term, describing reproductive biology or sex.  A woman is someone who lives as a woman who makes the choices of a woman, a female is someone who is (or was) an egg carrier, even if they are infertile.

I was knocked back, though.

“Everyone has their own pet nomenclature,” I was told, my own understandings knocked back into some kind of accessory.  “It’s just semantics.”

I responded that I thought words are important, and the only tool we, as humans, have to create a shared understanding.

I must think that, with the number of them I have gone through in the past twenty years trying to understand, explain, and get feedback on my own understanding of myself and the world.

It’s not the words that are important, of course.  Words are just symbols.

It’s the meaning that is important, and more than that, the worldview that the meaning lives in.

“I am the shadows my words cast,” as Octavio Paz said.   Not the words, but the shadows behind them.

It has always made me crazy that people talk about gender but can’t then define that word.  What is gender?  To me, gender is a system of communication around reproductive biology  that defines and enforce roles around reproduction and child rearing.  Race and Class are other systems of communication that define and enforce social roles, too, but they are rules about wealth, power and status.

Sure, people talk about “my gender,”  but that is a discussion of where they see themselves in that communication, their limits and challenges in that system.

If we don’t have meaning for the terms we use, and if we dismiss the terms others use as just semantics, does that mean we don’t have a clear worldview?

I suspect that it does.

And I suspect that for all transpeople complain about people not understanding them, about how we can’t come together, work together and create community, in the dark background, there is a reason we resist a clear worldview that might let us explain and connect.

Fuzzy, you see, lets us rationalize and float in the moment.

For example, if we are clear about who we are, well, how can we be who our wife needs us to be too?

We are used to using words not as a clear statement but rather as a flexible identity, allowing us to shift, sway and manipulate in the moment.

As long as nothing has meaning, as long as it’s only semantics, as long as everyone has a pet nomenclature and one has no more credibility than another, then whatever we say in the moment is fine, true, real.

Normal people, those in the mainstream, never have to work to test and understand their worldview.  It is only challenges that test us, that require us to figure out what is truly important to us, what is at the base and bedrock of who we are.   Illness, failure, whatever; the result is the same.  We have to get clear and make choices, choices that “normal” people take for granted.

Joseph Campbell talks about the most powerful rituals always being around this theme.  It is when people have to let go of things they like or desire in order to hold onto what they value that they really have to struggle with themselves.

For transpeople who want to hold on, and not fall into the fire that burns away what is not really us, a fuzzy and flexible approach to language allows wiggle room, enough room to not have to be clear, present and profound.

Dismissing words that challenge us as just semantics, a kind of pet nomenclature, is dismissing challenges to our own worldview, dismissing the call to be clear and specific about what we believe, especially the contradictions and ambiguity we hold close to us.

Every hero’s journey is about finding truth, truth hidden behind the fuzzyness of social creation.

And that’s why it is always terrifying.

Shazam!

Do you every feel like Billy Batson?

All Billy had to do was say Shazam! and the wizard Shazam hits him with a lightening bolt that gives Billy the strength of six mythical heroes.

Shazam!

My Billy Batson feeling is a bit different.

TBB is in NY this week to visit her son at her old alma mater.  And at the end of the week, her daughter comes up and the three of them spend some time in NYC, where TBB grew up.

The last time they were all in NYC they saw the movie TransAmerica.  It was a transsexual woman named Bree traveling the country with her son and daughter  watching a movie about about a transsexual woman named Bree crossing the country with her son.   In this case, life is more compelling than art.

But what will TBB do midweek, when kids are not available?

Shazam!

A wizard named TBB descends on me like a lightening bolt!

Do I engage the magic or just let it fall?

Dr. Phil and Oprah make me stupid.  I find it hard to concentrate on things like cooking with them nattering in the background, but I have no other choice.  That’s why I do things like burn myself like I did today, because I can’t be in and of my self, focused and concentrated.  The burn on my left index finger compliments the deep, deep cut still trying to heal on my left thumb.

It’s my parents house that makes me stupid, of course, so much power that I need to ground out, to blunt and to bleed out.

But TBB, well, she is like a lens.  Her kinesthetic power just opens up everything, cracks shells and lights up the dark corners so nothing can hide.

My parents, well, they have been hit before.

After all, they have had Kate Bornstein in their living room after the Kriplau debacle almost seven years ago now.

The problem is that I still have to be here after TBB leaves.

Who the hell else will take care of my parents?

And I don’t want them to have a bite at my own powerful, deep, inner and developed self.

Better they get my slave name and my dumbed down actions, the better for them to correct me over.

I want the magic, the lightening bolt, the energy of six mythological figures to be unleashed in me.

I want to feel the power of TBB, and use her like the booster she is.

But I don’t want to have to feel the creep of collapse afterwards.  I’ve been there too many times; it hurts.

A force of nature, here with a huge heart.

And me staying small.

Shazam.

most of a bitter fruit.

From a powerful post that talked about being a “sideshow” in the pursuit of sex, saying “if i turned men down for being married or having a GF,  i would never get laid,”  and discussing how partners wanted a penis, I called this the quote of the day on a list:

“In the meantime
i’ll take the sex
where i can
and
make the most
of a bitter fruit.”

The author thought I was mocking her, putting down her sexual choices, and wanted to make it clear that everything would change once she got genital reconstruction surgery.

Don’t assume, as they said on “The Odd Couple.”

I found your comments honest and raw, and that made them refreshing.

So much of trannydom is about denying our Eros, not about engaging it.

I affirm your choices, and the fresh way you speak them out loud.

I will note that know many transwomen who functioned as “she-males” in relationships and then found genital reconstruction challenging.  Some found that without their “something special” that they were just another woman, and competing with women born female was a challenge; they had neither the pedigee or the goods to play on that field.  Others realized this would happen and eventually chose to not get genital reconstruction so they still had “something special” for partners.

As for me, I don’t have any comment on what you are “supposed” to do; you need to find your own path to a full life, and for most people, that is deciding where to follow the rules and where to break them.

E-mail has no tone; it’s just text on a screen.

Please don’t assume people disapprove of you; you may find that they find honest and straightforward expression to be a gift.

Even when it’s about the price we pay to get what we need, what our heart craves, in such a heterosexist culture.

The author answered, saying sex with men was very “notch on the belt,” while women opened her heart.  She talked about having a chip on her shoulder that kept her safe, and how after she had surgery, she would be able to walk around a womens locker room without anxiety.

I replied:

You have the power to reshape your body in any way that satisfies you, in any way that expresses who you know yourself to be.

You should do what you feel called to do.

In my experience, though, there are limits to the power we have to female a body that went through puberty as a male.

Bones don’t lie, and a lost girlhood, those days of change and potency and bonding, can never really be recovered.

The challenge, of course, is not just how you see yourself but how others see you.

Will a reshaped pudenda be enough for you to let go of your anxieties and chips?

I’d love to believe that surgery is magical, powerfully changing the way others see us, but in my experience I haven’t seen that happen for most people.

After all, if people as beautiful as Candis Cayne can’t pass as female, even after feminizing surgery, many of us have much less chance.

Maybe the real transcendence of heterosexism is accepting that being a woman is about our choices and our knowledge, and not about the shape of our crotch.

Maybe the defect isn’t between our legs, but in the culture that affirms crotches over hearts.

Shape your body the way that makes you comfortable, yes.

But don’t invest genital reconstruction with too much magic; that can lead to disappointment.

Eros is potent, the desires we have inside, from the desire to be beautiful, to the desire to be affirmed, to the desire to connect with others.

Eros has to drive our choices, following desire.

But we are human, and Eros tempered with sensibility has often turned out to be the best course, balancing the fire of the heart with the ice of the mind.

In the end, I decided that humans are much more likely to make mistakes than God, and she has made people like me through all human history.

And in many cultures, people like me were valued and respected for our own unique gifts, rather than asked to try to fit in one box or another.

It’s the human created boxes I ended up seeing as creating anxiety and chips, not any God created defects.

But that’s just where I came out.

Blessings on your journey, wherever it takes you.

Year, Silence

Yesterday my sister, who is off this week, drove my parents on a day trip.

It’s exactly a year since my sister threatened to call the authorities and lie to them about me being a danger to my parents so they would remove me from the house unless I complied with demands.  My parents put her up to it; my father thought I might take it better from a “peer” than from an “authority figure.”

So I left a document for the parents to sign saying that over the past year I had never intentionally hurt them, nor had I threatened to hurt them, and that they felt safe over the year.

When I got back my sister was just leaving.  She told me about the details of the trip.

My parents didn’t say anything, so I looked by the computer.  They had signed it, my sister even choosing to make a line and sign.

That’s not the odd thing.

The odd thing is that no one said anything about it.

Not even “Thanks for taking care of us.”

Nothing.

My sister’s off this week.  You might think she would try and make some time for me, take me out for a meal or a drink or some such.

Nope, nothing scheduled yet.

Silence.

And me hidden away, invisible as the transwoman I am, so I can’t even reach out for support.

I once had a co-worker who, when speaking of e-mails from me, said that he put them in the “too-hard basket.”

Maybe that’s where I will always live.

Today

every morning i wake up and wonder

what life do i have to deny today?

what pain do i have to sumblimate today?

what tears do i have to swallow today?

what dreams do i have to sacrifice today?

what devaluing do i have to incur today?

what beauty do i have to sequester today?

what frustration do i have to stifle today?

what songs do i have to silence today?

what possibilities do i have to put down today?

what hopes do i have to shatter today?

what suffering do i have to endure today?

what abuse do i have to absorb today?

what ignorance do i have to brook today?

what new cheek do i have to turn today?

what love do i have to incerate today?

what invisibility do i have to tolerate today?

what disrespect do i have to let pass today?

what joy do i have to poision today?

what myopia do i have to countenance today?

what fear do i have to withstand today?

what acting out do i have to stomach today?

what judgements do i have to weather today?

what of myself do i have to destroy today?

i don’t know how to
both be small
and be big

and those who want change from me
are also clear
they want me to stay small and serve
following the way
they deny daily.

but my context never changes
the coal face is right here
and it is killing me today.

Safe To Grow

I watched a video some local t-girls made of their night powl through consignment shops and bars.

They ended by stopping outside a closed local gay bar and talking about buying it to be opened as a trans-friendly space.

In their imaginations, they wanted it to be open for new girls so they could have somewhere to come out.

My dream is different.

I want a place that is safe enough to bring out old trannys.

I imagine somewhere that the experience of years can be brought out and shared.

This is no small challenge.

Transpeople who have achieved some level of assimilation in their lives also have something to lose.

It’s easy for us to believe that we have claimed a life based on being silent about our biology, our history, our transgression, our queerness, and breaking that silence risks everything we have gained.

I remember being asked by a WBT person what I would say about a woman who had a husband, who had mothered a family, who had a network of girlfriends.  Wasn’t she really a woman?

Yes, I agreed.  And really proof that it is the choices you make that define your life, and not your birth sex.  She proves that being a woman is about being a woman, and not about what is between your legs, now or in the past.

The visible trans experience is usually all about the adolescent and the iconoclastic transpeople.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if the assimilated transpeople also had a voice, had a place to share?

But they know the cost.  They won’t just jump into interviews, expose themselves to abuse and pressure.  They have been there and done that.

And much of that pressure comes from newly out or not out transpeople.  You see, they live in the “should” of trans, the claiming experience, rather than in the reality of trans, the life experience.

I have seen new transsexuals claim that they would never go back, and dismiss transpeople who live complicated lives in order to satisfy their obligations.   In a film I even saw a leader dismiss any transwomen who let their teenage kids call them “Dad.”

I have seen crossdressers assert that anyone assigned as male at birth must be like them, and gay men assume that transsexual women are “in drag.”

And when mature transpeople share their experiences, and the limits of them, I have seen them shouted down by baby trannys who need to hold onto their dreams.

There is a reason that so many transpeople walk away from the structures of the interlocking communities around trans as they mature.   There is little point fighting the same old fights and exposing yourself to the same old attacks when you can focus on the much more important and nuanced job of building a graceful & potent life.

For a number of reasons, this notion is hard to explain to transpeople who are just coming out, or who have resisted transforming and assimilating.  I suspect these are the same reasons it’s hard for adults and teenagers to be peers; they have different goals and different experience.  Stories only stay simple until they are not simple anymore, and then they are twisted, detailed, challenging and real.

I don’t imagine making safe space for people to come out.

Rather I imagine making safe space for people to grow up.

And that means respect for challenges and nuance, means honoring not just our dreams but also our scars.

That seems a long way away, though.

Unanchored Death

On a list, someone offered a link to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM–vOZZBcA

I responded:

I guess that I am confused.

The video asserts that the average rate of suicide is 3 people per 100,000 people.  I’m guessing, because it is not stated, that is per year in the United States.

It then says that the “Transgender Transsexual” suicide rate is 31%. Assuming that this means people who identify as transgender or transsexual, that number is difficult.

If this is related to the first fact, does this mean almost a third of those who identify as transgender or transsexual kill themselves every year?   While I do know people who have committed suicide, and know that it is a serious problem for our population, I don’t know that 31% kill themselves every year.

Even if that is a lifetime figure, do 31% of TG/TS identified people really take their own lives?  If that is true, we should have many more reports on this list and in transmedia about those who have ended their lives.

And the assertion that 50% of transsexuals have a suicide attempt before their 20th birthday;  where does that statistic come from?

For me personally, the relationship between death and transgender is profound.   Death is required for rebirth. We have to find the death of the expectations and assumptions placed on us before we can break through and free who we know ourselves to be.

For some, the pain and weight of social stigma does lead to the death of the body, either by our own hand, by violence, or just by the kinds of choices we are lead to make.  It might be hormones or injectable silicone, or it might be heart disease and diabetes from the neglect and denial of our bodies, all triggered by enormous levels of stress from stigma and lack of effective support systems.  The requirement of denial does have a price.

I wrote my first suicide note over thirty years ago now.  I needed to explore what needed to die.  In that time, however, I personally haven’t had one suicide attempt.   Stress and denial, however, are claiming their price on my body.

Yes, death and transgender have a profound relationship.   The experience of death, of having to attempt to kill off something inside, of being attacked for being who we are, for the expectation that death is part of our eventual rebirth, well, that’s a huge deal.

Yes, transpeople are forced to live closer to death than most in this culture, and that can have an enormous price in our lives.

I’m just not sure that experience can be expressed in unanchored statistics.

It seems woven into our queer lives, and not the quantified data of a defined group.

Knife Story

So my sister was over one day while my father was on the deck, replanting the overgrown rubber plant from the parent’s bedroom.

It had taken a while to get here; pots and rocks and so on, building a workstation that held florist’s wire and bamboo poles so he could just do the work he was ordered to do by my mother.

I looked out and saw he had taken a knife from the kitchen to use in this gardening adventure.

Problem is it was one of the two knives I use to cook with.  They are both drop forged knives from Boscov’s, a $5 seven inch santoku and a $3 four inch parer.

I quietly found one of their old knives and swapped it with the knife I use to prepare dinner every night, as my sister watched.

My father didn’t mind; any tool to hand.  He often complains that his workbench is a mess, but I have pulled it apart and reordered three or four times in the last six and a half years, the first time when I was told to do a brake job on one of the old cars.  He’s never been one of those guys who made outlines on pegboards to manage tools.  No, instead he had me as assistant to sort through piles of whatever and find what he needed, someone to complain about and blame when he couldn’t find what he needs.

When my sister came in, I held the knife up to the light, showing her where the edge was just broken away.

She left, and I got out the whetstone and reground the edge, then honed it to a reasonable sharpness.  Not a professional job by any means, but at least I had a knife I could work with.

My birthday came so my sister left me a small bag of presents.  A couple of bars of chocolate with expiration dates at least a year old, chocolate that I had found for her and she had ignored until regifting.  Three bottles of Dr. Bronner’s soap, in the peppermint I first used in 1971, plus the odd scents of teatree and lavender.  It turns out they were on clearance at GNC.

And there was a knife.  A Henckels Twin Four Star Two five and a half inch santoku.

That’s a nice knife.  It’s kind of like the Jack Daniels of knives; real drinkers may prefer Makers Mark or even one of the new single batch bourbons, but everyone knows Jack Daniels.  Now, I almost got tossed from the Lynchburg tour by the professional good ol’ boy for being a smart assed city slicker who actually knows how the JD legend was created and how the commerical bits of the operation are hidden in Louisville, but still, everyone knows Jack Daniels.

It’s like a $100 knife.  Almost a real knife.  A big difference from my $8 mixed set of forged knives.

When my sister finally talked to me, in about a week, I thanked her.  I acknowledged how nice a knife it was, but I also noted that it was a bit small for my hands.  I wanted her to understand if I didn’t use it.  I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t know much about what knives I use.  She finds it virtually impossible to enter my world, so the telegrams are all she has.

“I wanted you to have something nice,” she told me, “something you touch everyday and that you know is quality.  We can easily exchange the knife for one you will use.”

It’s another couple of weeks down the line and we talked again.

“Hay, why don’t you give me that knife and I’ll get one that fits you,” she said.

“Well, it’s a bit lost at the moment,” I told her.  My mother was purging the living room of the unsightly, which means purging it of the functionality I use, and wanted my small pile of birthday gifts out of the way.  I took them down and tossed them into the big pile that is my stuff; no place for display or value.  Included was the birthday card my mother chose for me, saying that she wasn’t sure if I was over the hill, but that she was positive that I am over the edge.  How sweet.  She inscribed it that she and my father would do anything to help me, but I knew that didn’t include things as simple as being ready on time to go out; I’d still have to pull her and end up banged.

“Besides,” I said to my sister, “It’s too good to use here.”

“Oh,” she said.

“If they beat up that one, it wouldn’t be good,” I continued.

“I get that,” she said.

I have a drawer of decent knives, IVO from Portugal, that I keep hidden so they won’t be destroyed.

That also means I rarely use them.

“If I touched that expensive knife everyday, I’d just think that because they don’t value or even respect my stuff, I would just have remember to always hide it away from them,” I explained.

“Yeah,” she said, after a pause.

“That’s just no different than what you have to do everyday anyway.”

Symbolic Bleed

Liev Schriber talks about his role as Vilma in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3I95fAQ9q8

According to Schriber, Ang Lee’s vision of Vilma is an “angel” who proves to the protagonist that if she can be comfortable in her own skin, anyone can, affirming the possibility of transformation.

Yeah. Vilma is a stylized and symbolic character who plays her part in the story.  She is constructed to make a point, not to breathe.

Just like Miss Vida Boheme in To Wang Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar.  “Is it OK if I think of you as an angel? “  “That’ll do.”

And when she got played back to me as the way a transperson can be in the world, well, I wasn’t happy.

It might be different if people knew a range of transpeople in their lives, knowing them as people first.

But when our only media representations are as symbolic characters, most often played by non-trans people, well, that smells.

“I see the negro character as a representation of oppression, and the way that Woody Harrelson plays him is really transcendent.”

Somehow, I don’t think so.

Every character in a story may carry symbols.

But when they don’t carry the blood of human truth, well, that makes me feel like they are reduced.

And that hurts.

Fallacy

One big fallacy inside the transgender community — heck, one big fallacy inside of American culture — is the notion that all we communicate is what we intend to communicate.

Isn’t the whole point of therapy learning to listen to ourselves to find that we are disconnected from inside of us?   Therapy presumes that wee need to know more than our conscious thoughts to understand our choices, our actions.  We need to know what we do not yet have voice or words for, need to know what drives us on other than conscious levels.  A therapist is someone who sees something in you that you cannot yet see in yourself, someone who helps with the revelation of you to you.

There is so much we don’t easily communicate to ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we don’t communicate that stuff to others.  We are always communicating, on so many levels.

Trans, of course, is an exercise in expression.  We need, need, need, need to communicate our self, our inner truth in the world.  If we didn’t need to explore expression, we wouldn’t be trans.  And if we didn’t need the feedback of others to affirm and reflect that expression, we would be able to stay in the closet forever.

Yet, it’s hard to be comfortable knowing that we are leaking our unconscious in every moment of our expression.  It’s hard to be comfortable knowing that others are catching a glimpse of what we are not yet comfortable seeing in ourselves.

For many transsexuals and crossdressers, their preferred solution is to silence those who see or reflect what they don’t want to be exposed in themselves.  For example, some transsexuals want to be cured, want to be nothing but women so much that they shoot at everyone who might offer a glimpse of them as someone with a crossing history, as someone with a queer story.   They demand that anyone who says anything that might reflect on them must have approval, demand that the only acceptable view of themselves is the view they themselves claim.

Any dissonance between the view they claim and the view others have may be called abuse; they want the way people experience them to be constrained to their own claims, even as they demand the right to characterize others who challenge them in any way they want.

To be actualized, at least to me, is to move past the fallacy that all we communicate is what we intend to communicate, to stop trying so hard to claim our own rationalized view of ourselves, and start trying to pay attention to what we are actually communicating, to accept the reflections of others, sorting out between the projections and the revelations, and use those reflections to discover more about who we are and what we are putting out.

This is important to me because I have identified a great area of loss over the past decades has been based on desperately trying to filter my communications rather than just trusting who I am.

My mother and father taught me early how to walk on eggshells, holding back and controlling.

Today I know that people who control and constrain are never seen as being as accessible and engaging as people who come from a deep and clear truth, people who are comfortable in their own skin.

In the end, projecting who you want to be is different than just being yourself.   If you are aware and conscious of your expressions, you can learn much, much more from revelation than from projection.

I understand why I walk on eggshells, why I still do.

But I also understand why it is just that control that holds me back, constraining and hurting me.

My mother took the injunction “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” way too literally.

If being happy will piss her off, make her act out to sabotage, does that mean I have no right to be happy?

I know, know, know that if I want to connect with other people, I have to be present for myself, have to move beyond the fallacy that in the long run, more control can get you anything other than more strain.

If I stop my truth from being present, how can I live my truth in the world?

Asked And Told

TBB is out on the ship now.

Well, it’s more that TBB knows she is out on the ship now, and that’s good.

Since the first things you find when you Google her name are testimony before Congress on transgender job discrimination and a feature length documentary on the sex change capitol of the world, well, I doubt she was really “in the closet” for very long anyway.

And while I love her, she passes as transsexual, not as female.  Bones, voice, all those things, you know.  I said to her “Well, you ain’t 5′ 2″,” and she readily agreed.  Of course, that didn’t stop her from asking me not to go with her to her Salsa classes; her born-female pal said that being with another transwoman would out her.  It’s been two years now, though; I think she is past that.

In the end, she is a pro, really good at what she does, mature and trustworthy.  That’s enough, it turns out, even for a veteran of the submarine service, who as management doesn’t think they did enough to ensure her a safe & comfortable work place, nor that they acted rapidly enough to address threats to her.

Years ago a friend who was working so hard to keep her head down at the local addiction clinic where she worked came in and found an article that mentioned her trans activism on the bulletin board.  The note was from the boss, congratulating her on being noted.  It turned out she wasn’t really in the closet, either.

TBB feels good that people are finally relaxed enough to talk about “the elephant in the room,”  though she notes that much of the old elephant is now located in medical waste dump in Utah.

In the end, it’s better not to have to hide.

And better to know that a woman can get respect and dignity, even if she happened to be identified as male at birth.

Does Queer Theory Help?

The question: “Is it possible to live life in more than one gender and still not be rejected by almost every LGB I meet”gays who broadly can`t fathom “cutting it off” (freak) and lesbians don`t want “former men” into the girls club. I don`t seem to fit in anywhere unless change occured.”

My answer:

The reason Queer Theory is taboo is simple; it challenges feminist theory.

And all university students are inculcated into feminist theory.

The basis of current, second wave, feminism is that there are overlapping systems of oppression based on race, class and gender groupings, and we must band together as groups to challenge this oppression.

Therefore, the whole thing is about group identity, about admitting that by being raised as a white christian male you are an oppressor.

The basis of this second wave is political, creating an us vs them belief systems, allowing victimhood to be valor, demanding obedience to the most damaged.  It very much follows black identity formation, where us vs them creates space for black leaders.

Queer theory, which I identify as trans, is more rooted in 1960s first wave feminism, where the goal was around “the belief that women are people too.”  In this model, feminists wanted a fair and equal playing field, not the kind of continuing affirmative action that second wave demands to aid oppressed groups, the kind of breaks that allow us vs them politics.

In queer theory, the individual is key, not the group.    We need to allow individuals free expression, beyond social demands.

LG theory (and I don’t include bisexual in this) is very much based on group identity formation.

In the heterosexist model, group identity is formed by birth reproductive biology, the penised vs the unpenised.  It posits that if you just know someone’s birth genitals, you know a great deal about them, maybe everything you need to know, especially if you also know skin color and class status.

The homo model likes that simple division, just adding two twists, females who love females and males who love males.

It’s a simplified model that abhors ambiguity and nuance.

And that’s the problem.  Bisexuals and transpeople, well, we break those nice, clean group boundaries.

So LG people often want to enforce those boundaries even more than het people.  Candis Cayne says it was always a gay guy who had to make sure everyone at the casting table knew she was “really a man.”   It’s a way they sell out to the normies; “I’m not queer or gender variant.   I’m just a normal man who needs sodomy on a Saturday night.”

What does this mean?

You know what it means.  It means we can never pass the basic tests of group identity.  As a woman, I can’t hate men, for example, can’t see them as the oppressor group.  Instead, I see them as individuals.

And that means we are left to create our own queer spaces where people are accepted and embraced for who they are as an individual, not their group identity.

Clearly, this is a huge subject, and the basis for lots of struggle.

In the end, though, I suspect that no matter how much you want to simply be a group member, you are past all that.  You can’t cut off parts of your heart, your head, your experience, your spirit, even if you can reshape your body.

You have to be yourself, whoever that is.  And you have to find your own balance between being tame enough to fit in to community well enough to get what you need & want, and being wild enough to always stand proud as who you are.

In the end, that’s the struggle everyone has, it’s just they don’t always know it yet.

But you?

If awareness was just bliss, everyone would already have it.

A followup:

Me being me, I have continued to think about why L & G people have such a desire to reject the basis of transgender.

They really want sexual orientation to be the overarching tent, what we all stand under.

We, on the other hand, want gender expression to be that encompassing issue.

“Straight acting” people who happen to be gay or lesbian have much less challenge in the world.  What they do in the bedroom is their business.

It’s the visibly gay people who offer the challenge, the feys and the butches.

And what they want is to hold onto their issued gender at all costs.  “Sure I dress as a woman for shows, but I am really a man,” say drags, just as crossdressers say “Sure I dress up as a hobby, but I am always really a man.”

And this is the basis of their politics that birth genitals are all, untranscendable, so they don’t see transwomen as trans, they see them as drags (or crossdressers.)

It’s this kind of thing:  http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/306244

In 1999, I wrote a long piece that made it into IFGE Tapestry on this:

http://callan.transpractice.com/text/GIAD.html

Maybe that would give you something to think on.

I had the sense this all didn’t make her happy, so I sent this:

I like this quote:

The great thing about getting older is that
you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
Madeleine L’Engle

And when i told it to Kate Bornstein, she laughed with glee.

“And all the other genders!” she immediately added.

Whoever you are tomorrow, you will never lose who you were today, who you were yesterday, and who you were a decade ago.

And that’s the gift of a complicated life.