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.

Queer Process

A list post from me, responding to a transman who wants to create an egalitarian process to create joint access on healthcare, the kind of process learned in twenty years as a lesbian.

One of the key differences between trans-identity and GL-identity is that by definition, Gays and Lesbians want to be part of a group.

Gays and Lesbians want to meet others like them and have relationships of some sort.  That’s the premise of the whole sexual identity thing; you want to have sexual relationships with people.

Transpeople, on the other hand, aren’t in it to shape an expression that will attract others.   We tend to be on a path to shape and expression that allows us to be visible as a unique individual rather than as a member of a group.

And very often, the group identities we do hold are at odds with our trans-expression.  We hold group identities that are designed to get us what we believe we need; jobs, status, relationships.  How many transsexual women continue to identify as gay men to stay in relationship with men, or identify as heterosexual crossdressers to stay in relationship with women?

In the midst of these conflicting challenges, an attempt to declare wild & free individuality and an attempt to maintain status & connection by being a tame member of community, the conflicts of connecting with other transpeople most often comes down the line, a lower priority.

It’s my experience that the kind of group identity formation that is common for lesbians and gays does not work very well for transpeople.  We don’t have the same desires and needs.   Trans is a very individual path, first, and it demands being able to walk away from group identity and find our own voices.   Most of us never were very well assimilated, and virtually all of us lack childhood and adolescent training in the mores and habits of our gender of choice.

The most successful transpeople I have seen are the ones who are able to express individual leadership, and not the ones who want to form group identities and egalitarian think that surrenders our own impetus to the group.

For me, the most empowering and interweaving comes from a commitment to queer process.  Queer means celebrating the individual over the group, coming to the place where you can affirm and celebrate choices others make that you would never, ever make for yourself.   To me, as long as the behavior others do is consensual and not destructive, I support their choices and hope that they will support mine.

This celebration of individuality and queerness as being at the heart of process can often be very difficult for those who like a more homogeneous group.  I remember one transwoman who decided that all transpeople should see themselves as being on a team like the Montreal Canadiens.   I asked about the benefits people would get from team membership; was there a training program, job support, social events, status or anything else?   No, she replied.  She just was uncomfortable with transwomen who made choices she found icky, and wanted them to clean up their act (read: be more like her, follow her choices.)

Healthcare is an important issue for transpeople, yes.

But my experience says that empowerment is even more important, because when you feel empowered you can not only stand up for yourself, you can also stand up for others who make choices you would never make for yourself.

And that kind of empowerment is very hard for those who need, need, need, need to use denial to stay anchored in group identities that reject queer expression.   It’s not until you are there in accepting your own queerness that you can accept the queerness of others, at least as far as I have seen.

I do know that this statement will probably baffling to many members of the group, who want everything to be as simple as their explanations need to be.

But it is a statement of what I have come to know in 25 years wandering through the interlocking communities around transgender.

A followup, discussing the need to find others like us while also rejecting those we don’t yet have the capacity to like because they challenge our unhealed places

One of the blessings of a big city is that there is a large enough population to get affinity groups of transpeople, micro-communities of transpeople that can’t be supported without the density of population.

You say that you want to connect with a group caled “Tgirls,” who presumably have a reasonable amount in common.  I suspect that I would not find those groups particularly comfortable for me.

As I noted, I don’t believe that there is one trans-community, but a number of interlocking communities around trans, interlocking because a few members of one group also belong to another group, creating links.  This list is community, but it isn’t home for everyone.

We do need connections, and we do find them, but being so thin on the ground, we tend to focus on our little group, and move on as that group no longer meets our needs.  Transpeople are always coming and going into our bits of community, leaving to explore or focus on what we need, and checking back in after a few months or years, then leaving again.

We all want to find people like us, but in my experience, that sense of being at one point is a transitory event for transpeople, who stay and learn, and then move on.

And one more:

When you talk about space where we feel safe, you hit the nail on the head.

There are so many ways transpeople can feel not safe.  After all, the one thing we share is being shamed into the closet, feeling the social stigma against being too queer, too wild, too deviant, against crossing the lines of gender that most people see as real and rigid.

And that vital question, how queer is too queer, how queer is not queer enough seems often to be at the root of feeling unsafe.

We hold our own worldview and when that worldview is challenged we often don’t tend to come back.

For crossdressers that challenge can often be in queerness itself.  SSS put up organizational blocks against transsexuals and homosexuals; they just didn’t want to go there, saying that it would scare off the wives.

For more mature transpeople, it is the trans as hobby or party attitude that can feel unsafe.  If people don’t want to see their trans expression as real, rather as just play, they often work to diminish the reality of others, asserting that change is impossible.

So much of the trans experience is about being in an adolescent state, trying on new ways to be that often fit only part of us.  Like any adolescent, part of that process is also rejecting what is uncool; rather than making statements about who we are, we make statements about who we are not.   To be in the in-group there must also be an out-group, and rejection becomes how we define our identity.

To be a mature transperson is to be confident enough in who you are that the you don’t find the choices of others to be threatening.  Of course, it’s still easy to find them tedious and immature.

Language, though, is a precious thing.  I don’t yet believe that we do have a language that we share about expressing the trans experience.  In my mind, the tradition of the first thing many say to explain trans proves that: “There are crossdressers, drags and transsexuals,” making statements about separating facets of trans expression rather than making statements about connecting facets.

I have run through the last 25 years trying to create language about shared trans-identity, listening to the narratives of other transpeople and reflecting the common themes in my own words.   Rather than trying to assert my beliefs against the stories & beliefs of others, I try to shape my understanding so there is room for their concerns and expression in my worldview; just another attempt at a queer process.

We do need shared language.  I just think that means that some language has to go to find better, more common and more effective language that can make connections rather than just separations.

But that’s just me.

The Limits Of Reason

Reason has always seemed to me to be very limiting.

Useful but ultimately not grounded in truth, and possibly even a force to constrain life.

If there is one thing we learn from transgender it’s the limits of reason.

For a physical male to claim to be a woman is about as unreasonable as you get.

And yet, that passionate claim is the beginning of truth.

Reason needs to flow from first principles, and first principles always come down to feeling.

The need for justice in the world is not reasonable, it’s a passion.

The idea of human equality, or the right to determine one’s own life, is not a matter of reason.

Reason is necessary to flow from first principles, to make something of them, and stay focused, but it’s not the ground, nor is it really the heavens.

The Christian tradition, especially in the early centuries and the Middle Ages, saw itself as based on Right Reason.

But faith, and doctrine, (very different things) were the root.

There’s a Tarot card that shows the balance of reason and feeling.

In the famous Rider deck, the Lovers shows Adam and Eve, naked before the two trees, with an angel above them, arms outstretched, to bless them.

This alone is radical, because in the Bible story the only angel who appears is the seraph with the flaming sword to keep them from sneaking back into Eden.  but the picture contains an even more daring symbolism.

The man–Adam–looks to the woman, Eve, who looks up at the angel.

Rationality can take us only so far and then we must move through emotion and passion to reach spiritual blessing.

Contrast this with the Church’s rule that women must not speak in Church, their husbands must speak for them, because women are closer to animals, while men, supposedly more rational, are closer to angels.

Rachel Pollack, 8 August 2009

Ms. Rachelle’s blog has come back to life!

Check it out here: http://rachelpollack.wordpress.com/

From The Slushpile

My voice has been missing the last few weeks.

I thank Gwyneth, Grace and Jendi for their kind care, concern and support.

The best I can offer is my current slushpile.

Maybe something makes sense here.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

“demolition by decay“
the term urban planners use
to describe the destruction of neighborhoods by neglect
the term I use
to describe the destruction of lives by the denial of life.

I need to feel
skin
hope
exuberance
passion, eros
seen
alive

I am sick of feeling
denial
self swallowing
locked down
dead

I live in their world
and there is no room
for me

Their stories
crowd out their opportunities
squeezing away the possibility
of change

what we are
focused on
is
what we are.

denial of imagination
denial of potential
battle of denial
do it for me, honey

where is my world?
lost in pap
donmpy

we all need someplace
to be bad
while we develop
our own excellence
failure building proficiency
trials providing answers
rehersal honing performance
chipping revealing truth
creation making brilliance

took a survey
http://irbapproved.blogspot.com/2009/07/counseling-psych-survey-mental-health.html
about self harm in trans experience
shook me up after
i added 10 statements of my own
about the line between self-harm and discipline, self-harm and servicing
but if the survey pushed your buttons
they offer no money to find support

rachel says the person interviewing sister wendy
wanted to know how happy she was
to be out of her trailer/cell
and in the world
but wendy just said she hated every moment of it
she and the monastic life
are made the same way.

my monastic life:
plenty of service & denial
not nearly enough performance & community
contemplation (& coca-cola) my only solace
disconnection & diabetes

why serve the dying
in their world
when you have the gifts
to serve the living
in your world?
because
who else will serve
the dying?

“you have to honor choices.”
rachel pollack

the job of a guru
is to place us
in a story
finding context
for what seems mundane
because, after all
story is what positions us
in a wider world
in a bigger universe

“the guy who ends up with
the best toys
isn’t the winner.
it’s the guy who ends up with
the best stories.”
billy mays, 1958-2009

if hanging with kids
keeps you young
does hanging with seniors
make you old?

with young people, care is an investment
with aged people, care is an expense
a costly expense

Can’t Simultaneously

I cannot simultaneously be who I am now and also be someone new.

In fact, if I am immersed deeply enough in who I am now, I will probably not even be able to imagine being someone new.

The person I am now is the person I think I need to be to handle the obligations I see before me.

The person I am now can be tweaked, maybe, but cannot be changed unless the obligations I see are changed.   That change may be at my discretion, deciding to rethink my obligations, or the change can be pushed on me, by sickness, unemployment or other situations.

I’m writing this about me, of course.  I ask myself why I am stuck, and the answer is clear: I am the person I think I need to be to handle the obligations I see before me.

But I suspect that it’s true for more than just me.  Unless we are offered a new way to handle obligations, or unless we see those obligations change, we are where we think we have to be.  We adapt to our environment, so changing the environment is the only way to create change.

For example, you can’t both stop using alcohol and service an obligation to party with your drinking friends.  That’s why changing your percieved obligations is a key part of recovery, and the way those obligations are changed is by changing your environment; you go to meetings rather than going to bars.

My parents, in all their twists and limits, are what I see as obligations in my life.

My sister goes t0 the same doctor as my mother.  At her appointment, they talked a bit about my mother’s help.  The doctor said I seemed to be good with my mother, really helping negotiate between my mother’s world and the wider world.  I had to do that two days ago when we had to discuss the mass on my mother’s kidney that might be cancer.

“It really costs them, a lot, though,” my sister said, reffering to me.

“Yes,” the doctor answered.  “It is costs their life.”

My sister told me this story to acknowledge that at least some people see how these obligations cost me my life.

What they don’t see is a way to help, either helping with the obligations, or helping me with what I have to sweep away as a full-time, no-maintenance caregiver who can only live in my parents world and not in mine.  And there is no room for most of me in that world.

I cannot simultaneously be who I am now and also be someone new.

In fact, if I am immersed deeply enough in who I am now, I will probably not even be able to imagine being someone new.

The person I am now is the person I think I need to be to handle the obligations I see before me.

The person I am now can be tweaked, maybe, but cannot be changed unless the obligations I see are changed.   That change may be at my discretion, deciding to rethink my obligations, or the change can be pushed on me, by sickness, unemployment or other situations.

But as long as I have those obligations, I can’t both be who I am now and also someone new.

And the cost of that is my life.

Can’t Think

“Problem is that I can’t think like a normal person, like one of the gang,” I told my sister.

“In fact,” I said, “neither can you.”

“That’s right,” she replied.  “It’s why I always have to have an assistant manager who can think like the gang so I can know what they are thinking.”

It’s true.

If you give me enough time, I can work out what the gang thinks and feels, but actually being with them in real time?

No way, for me or my sister, and certainly not for my mother and father.

Just can’t do it.

Don’t Tell

One of the lessons I have learned is simple.

Don’t tell people that you are trans.

Instead, show them.

Unless they can see it, they won’t be able to see it, not unless they have a lot of experience with transpeople.

And if you can’t show them?

Just shut up.

Scary Lonely

I know the thing I find most unattractive in transpeople.  That is living on claims, demanding that others accept your assertions, usually while you are rejecting theirs.   I have seen this in many ways, mostly when people are clinging to some desired image of how life should be, some normative thread, be that gay man, het man, feminist or whatever.   The refusal to engage our own ambiguity and liminality, well, it leaves us just being bullies and whiners, demanding a simplistic view that others often find misleading.

But what scares me most in transpeople is what scares me most in me.   It’s when I see a transperson who is so individualistic that they seem too odd and too disconnected to me.   I understand the truth that trans always takes an individual journey, walking away from the expectations placed on us and into a very personal and unique expression.    We have to leave the crowd we are assigned to, of course, but that often means we never find a new crowd, a new home.

My resistance to trans expression has always been a response to this fear.   Since I never believed I could pass as female, I instead went for a kind of profound androgyny, individual not in physical expression but instead, individual in thought, belief and vision.  After all, I knew I had that kind of queerness since I was very, very young, and I knew that wasn’t going away.  I was already on the fringe, and that meant being visibly fringed too seemed to be a profound marginalization.

Since I never knew how to be one of the gang, I never imagined that I could be part of the gang.   Today, that’s a belief that I wish someone had helped me work through; it’s very possible that walking in harmony with my nature rather than fighting it would have made it much easier to assimilate, that the very demand for denial was what kept me separate and isolated.

I see the odd looking transpeople and they scare me, looking disconnected and unpleasant, at least in my limited vision.   They look so lonely, so isolated, so sad.

Of course, what I am seeing isn’t their experience of their life, rather I see the reflection of my own disconnection, my own loneliness, my own isolation, my own sadness.

Today, I can’t imagine where or how I can fit in anywhere, how I can transcend my own loneliness.  By this age, I know my own nature.  I know that there is no way I can just surrender myself to a group.  I know, really know, that while I can think clearly and transcendentally, I can’t think like a member of the group.  I don’t have a model of the audience in my head, I am not a member of that group.

My home is inside my own head, and nowhere else.  I am safe & understood with myself, and nowhere else.  I can’t imagine finding a group that will understand and help me without way too much oversimplification on my part.   I face my own lifemyth: I am too hip for the room, that no one will get the joke.  That is both profoundly true and profoundly untrue; I am just another human, I am unique.

Loneliness begets loneliness; isolation begets isolation.   I can’t imagine how to connect with other people on my level.  I know that I can go and take care of others, sure, but finding people who can reciprocate?  Hard.  My sister hauled me to that disastrous Kripl-U weekend knowing that people could value me.  Of course they could, if I met them where they are.  Does that mean they could meet me where I am, where I need?  Well, not really.    One of the things they tell people contemplating suicide is to not talk about it with people who haven’t already done the work around it, otherwise the listener will make it all about them and their feelings, and you will end up caring for them when you need caring.

People on a local T list vicariously love the babbling of a newly out warm-hearted tranny with a bisexual wife, and while she is sweet, she is also not thinking about her choices, her expression.  I made some comments, but decided the only thing I could do was just to not listen anymore.  The list goes to a folder in my mail, which I rarely look at, and I am much less frustrated and challenged by the smooge.

I am also, of course, more disconnected.

I feel my body fall away, sweet right through.  The circulation dies, and so do I.

We become what we fear, so unless we engage that fear and own it, rather than just play into it, it will destroy us.

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Jesus Christ (Gnostic Gospel Of Thomas, Saying 70)

My world collapses as my abused and neglected body decays.

Don’t let this happen to you, eh?

Between Service And Self Abuse

So, where is the line between aesthetic self denial in pursuit of service beyond oneself, a holy kind of commitment, and self-harm, where you hurt yourself to keep focus on the external?

It seems this is a line that women always face.  We understand the need to sacrifice for our family, but we also know that if we destroy ourselves that will not only hurt us, it will hurt our capacity for care and hurt the ones we love, who will be drawn into our own destruction.

So often we want others to help us find that line; our girlfriends to give context, our partners to give respite & renewal, our church, our world, our whatever to help us balance.

But so many of us lose that line lose any social support structure too.  Kids isolated in school, single mothers, those in an institution, so many who can so easily lose themselves in the demand for denial & obedience.

To me, anyway, it’s impossible to talk about self-harm without talking about the demand for denial & obedience.

I want to be smart in my service, but now, so many decades on, when I and the people who may have known me are so lost, being smart becomes almost impossible.  I wonder how and where I can be present for myself, and can’t imagine it fitting into the hours around the passive-aggressive demands of my parents for care.

People tell me that if I would just do this or that it would change, but the window to do and the resources to act feel insignificant, all leading to a void of hope.   Instead, I live in a past full of failures rather than a future full of possibilities.

This isn’t new, of course.  Jendi has commented in her blog on a prior post I wrote about this.

But, my life crashed on the rocks and unable to eat any more shit, last week was hard.

It’s not like you can call your sponsor and tell them you have slipped from self-denial to self-abuse; there is no support group to help with that line.   I enter their world, clean up their shit, and keep myself in a hole, clinging to sanity with the third volume of Caro’s Lyndon Johnson bio, sobbing over the battles against systematized and vicious racism in the 1950s.   What a painful place to find escape, eh, though the possibilities and costs of being big in the world are exposed there.

In one incident, Johnson tells his black bartender and driver that he shouldn’t care if people call him boy and nigger, that he always will be black, and he has to let that slip off him, as if he were “a piece of furniture.”

But having to be wood, well, doesn’t squeeze humanity out?