Scary Normal

On Halloween, most people want to dress up a bit wacky, get out of themselves by being odd and different for a night.

My fondest desire is the obverse.   I just want to go to the local cougar bar and flirt with good looking people.

They want a night of queer desire.   I want a night of normative desire, where I feel sexy and empowered in my own skin.

For most people, the thought of queer sets off warning bells.   For me, the idea of normal sets the klaxons blaring in my head.

No matter how comfortable, confident and sexy I may feel, sly and alluring, the dangers of desire are wired directly into my alarm system.   Getting a bit loose, a bit flirty, a bit aroused just feels like a trap, like walking onto a cleverly painted bit of canvas that will collapse under my aging feet, dropping me deep into the abyss.

ShamanGal is going to a party tonight, feeling some of the same trepidation.  She is in a very different place than I am, slim, young and beautiful, going to Hollywood with a woman born female who passionately believes in feminine desire.   This week, SG outed herself at writing class and the instructor was knocked back: this creature so comfortable in her skin was trans?

She is trans, of course, so I had her rehearse the safety line that could stop her “ending up like Gwen Araujo” as she feared.   “Are you bisexual?” she would ask suitors.  “I only kiss bisexual men. . .”

For me, though, mature and hefty with a quite husky body, that doesn’t seem as easy an option.    I look around for places to get loose, alone of course, and they escape me.

I know the tales of other transwomen, the limits to their coupling behaviour.   It ain’t easy.

For normies, Halloween is a time to play at queer.   For queers, Halloween is often a time to dream of normal, of being ourselves in the world in a way that doesn’t relegate our identity to the status of a costume.    Lie about your nature or be called a liar; the choice is often stark as we find other people who might easily decide to pound us to silence their own queer desire.

A good outfit and a drink or two and I can feel ready to be supple, playful and flirtatious.

Move towards that dream and the horns start blaring, the pounding aooo-gah of buzzers wired in so long ago and then recharged with every heartbreaking story of a transperson cut by someone who loved them and who couldn’t handle it.

Every woman wants to feel like a girl now and then, desirable and desired, hot and playful.   Halloween is when transwomen often feel the call, yet it is also when we feel the terror, the fright that threads through a lifetime of denied exposure.

Buy me a drink and convince me to pleasure you tonight, using my rounded body to create friction and heat that delights us both.

But really, really, we will never get that chance.

Shaman Eye

At Halloween, the veil between the worlds is thin, so thin that we can see between this world and the world of the ancestors.

When you engage your ability to see like a shaman, your vision not blocked by conventional walls of separation, your experience of being in the world changes.

The world opens up in front of you, connections becoming evident, ghosts walking everywhere.    Instead of seeing the surfaces that other people believe keep them small, you see the network of possibilities, the intersections between them and their choices.  As a cancer survivor said, “Once you open up, it’s amazing the paths you’ll cross.”

While they may want to stay small, staying with the old small talk, that becomes boring as shit to you.   You don’t just want to go deeper, you need to go deeper as holes line up in your vision to create tunnels which expose the laces that go through the trivial and into the profound.   Rather than just sloughing off the rude, unhealed and challenging, you end up staying with it, searching for the connections and truth within it.

Messages that might have been lost in the noise now start to resonate, reinforcing each other as the same meaning echoes from many different sources just because you are really listening.  Instead of cancelling out each other they support each other, a universal voice offering köans which lead you to unlock even more revelation and understanding.

Your shaman eye begins to hone in, your shaman ears begin to hear, and you begin to have the challenge of revelation.   As you open to spirit, barriers that used to block you and keep you comfortable now become lenses, demanding your attention and turning the routine into banal and annoying noise.

In Oprah’s “The Life You Want Weekend” she tells the audience that the reason she left her daily show is because she only wants to talk about healing and transformation.   She needed to go deep because that is the way she sees the world. Of course, there are still bills to be paid,  lifestyles to be be sustained, corporations to be fed, so her world still contains a raft of corporate sponsors which all have products that can help the new spiritual seeker.

Like every gift, the eye of the shaman eye comes with a price.

In the most ironic bit, a deepened sense of connection to the spiritual comes with a lessened sense of connection to the conventional.   When our observer sense is sharpened, revealing what lies beneath, staying at the level of everyday bullshit no longer is simply difficult, it becomes almost impossible.

Our desire for connection shifts from being wide, looking at numbers, to being deep, looking at intensity.   Simple surface pleasantries become intolerable even as we find it more and more difficult to find someone who can share and compliment our expanded vision.   Others can forget, but the best we can do is forgive.

Others around us find this hard to understand.   If we can see deeply, revealing connection and satisfying needs, don’t we have the obligation to use that ability to take care of them, to do the work that they do not yet envision?    If we have the wounds which demanded healing, don’t we have the responsibility to take care of other people who have not engaged their own healing, those who stay stuck?

When healing is needed we become invaluable, doing the work for the group, but when healing is resisted we become annoying pariahs, demanding attention to things they would rather not see.  Often, the highest resistance comes just before a breakthrough, so they end up acting out against us in a futile effort to silence the voice inside their own head.

People heal in their own time and in their own way.  We cannot be responsible for anyone else’s healing other than our own.   For those of us in relationship with other humans — and everyone needs relationship & connection — this is a difficult experience.  We do love others, do want to be there for them, but are still profoundly hurt every time they fail to grow, fail to make better choices, fail to engage their own responsibility.

I know why people resist the obligation of shaman eye, choosing to stay connected to convention rather than spirit.   You cannot just open yourself up to good and nice emotions, pleasant and affirming spirit.   When you open your heart, you have to open your heart to the whole world, the brilliance and the pain.  It is easy to be grateful for that which delights you, but being grateful for the pain which points out where healing is required is a much more difficult challenge.

My own shaman opening started very early, because my need for healing started early.  I found having a shaman eye frustrating.   I remember one therapist who said to me “Look, we are a full service HMO.   Would you like to have a lobotomy?   I can just check the box on the form and we can take care of it today?”   He knew that I valued my vision, my smarts, that I wouldn’t trade deep for easy, and he also knew that I would get the joke.   My mother in the sky often talks to me in jokes, as she knows that laughter helps the knife do the work.

It has taken me a long time to build a shaman toolkit that helps me work with my own vision, but the challenge still exists: Who cares for the caretakers?   Who can come into the world of people who have the vision, empathy and understanding to enter the world of other and care for them in a way that supports healing?

Seeing like a shaman brings gifts and makes great demands.   It offers connection with the deep while making the shallow, the defensive, the rationalized, the conventional, the small almost impossible to bear.

Even at Halloween, that is always a scary prospect.

Smiling Through

A confident smile is one of TBB’s most endearing qualities.   Wherever she is and whoever she meets, she greets them with a huge smile.

It’s just that big smile that draws people in,  engages you, and makes you part of her world.  Lots of people at Southern Comfort Conference found out that all you had to do was smile at her and soon you too would be helping make the conference a success.

That smile has charmed politicians and nuns, and has stirred the party on many occasions.  She comes by it naturally, with her rich Italian heritage and the traditions of hospitality that came by way of her sommelier father.

While I love TBB’s confident smile, the grin that smooths her way through a magical life, I know that my smile isn’t quite as solid.    In fact, I’m much more likely to look down at the floor or right past a person instead of giving them a big, warm confident smile.

Like so many things in my life, I am absolutely sure about the social benefits and reasons for the effectiveness of greeting people with a big smile.  The practicality of smiling, though, the actual doing it, often escapes my shaky emotional power.

My experience is about scanning the world.   Yes, part of that is scanning for threats, but a bigger part of that is just scanning for context, working to see and understand the situation rather than working to focus on connecting with the humans in front of me.   It feels easier and simpler to just duck them, avoiding both scrutiny and small talk.

I do know, of course, that avoiding giving people a shiny, confident smile also means avoiding giving them the chance to greet me, to connect with me on a simple, basic and very human level.    Not smiling means not flirting, which does keep you out of trouble but also keeps you out of fun.

A smile is a very vulnerable gesture, giving people the opportunity to decide how they want to see you.   To remain invisible it is usually best to remain unnoticed, just focused on your own work, while a smile is always a clear gesture of visibility.   See me, the smile says, and smile back at me, doing the dance of gracious human interaction.   I will freely give you my smile to brighten your day, and you may just decide to grant me your smile as a returned gift.

There isn’t much sophistication or nuance in a smile, which is why humans from two to ninety-two can easily share one.   That simplicity makes a smile both wonderfully universal and somewhat baffling & disquieting, especially to someone who is always looking for deeper information.   Exactly what is going on under that smile, we wonder.  Is a smile a disguise, an invitation for trouble or a promise that will be broken?

A smile is just a smile, I suspect that TBB would tell me, and you can rarely go amiss when sharing one.   Smile at the people and let them smile at you.

Every girl needs a good simile, I believe, but that’s just the writer in me speaking.  I never had a mother who could coach me on the power of a good smile, a much more fundamental tool for a woman than a simile.

I know that I need a more confident smile.   That would seem to require more confidence in a number of areas.

As I work on it, though, I can always remember what TBB would do when uncomfortable and faced with new people.

Smile.

 

Service Audience

“Why don’t you write for other people?   Write poetry, write fiction that they can engage on their own level, get some pleasure from?   Maybe, doing that would help you build an audience who would want to hear what you have to say on other subjects that are important to you.”

I write for myself.   I write with a sheer explicit force because I have something that I need to say, something I just don’t believe other people are engaging.

Sometimes, I write for others, helping them find their voice or get their messages into the world.  I do that as service.

My life of consuming service, though, left me battered.  I wasn’t able to take care of myself while taking care of my parents.

“You have spoken for me.  You have spoken for your mother.   When are you going to speak for yourself?” my father asked repeatedly from his deathbed.

I speak for myself.  The challenge isn’t me speaking for myself.   The challenge is speaking in a way that other people are eager, willing and able to really take on board.

There are good reasons for me to write in a voice other than the explicit, pedantic voice I habitually use now.   Success in reaching an audience is a good thing that can be parlayed into other forms of success, rewards that nourish and opportunities that extend the reach.   The communication of moments can draw people in, make them want to know more, want to open to a deeper understanding.

The blocks I hold to serving the desires of others are huge, accretions of a lifetime spent caring for other people, keeping them safe and comfortable through my own denial of desire, body and self.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?   If someone screams out their experience and there is no one there to engage it, does that person really exist?

I can easily make a list of the sensible things I should do to package myself to be attractive to an audience.   Actually doing that work after a lifetime spent packaging myself to be tolerable to an audience who didn’t want to be challenged, who didn’t get the joke, well, that is another ask altogether.

It took an enormous amount of effort and focus to do the kind of work I needed to do to be here today as functional as I am.   That is easy to forget, because it is like the iceberg; people see where I am, but not the struggle to get here.  In my experience, usually they just asked for more, saying that if I could make it to here, surely I could go farther.

The modern call to homogeneity makes people ask others to eliminate their differences, the bits that give them character.   We don’t see that the flip side of every struggle is a gift, that scars mark not just our imperfections but also our triumphs.

You can argue that I shouldn’t lead with my intensity, that I speaking in a more gentle and genteel way,  tame and assimilated, using a vernacular that serves people may be better for me, and you may be right.   You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and being of service to people in a way they find sweet enough to be palatable can bring rewards.

My struggle, though, hasn’t been sweet.   An easy life rarely brings the rewards of a strenuous life.   The lessons of continuous common humanity isn’t that you don’t have to change, don’t have to do the hard work of opening your heart, of feeling all your emotions, don’t have to let bits of you die so you can find new.    Change isn’t just another layer to put on, a moment out of your day.  Change is work.

I probably do need to get to a place where I can serve the world by creating more accessible bits which give people a handle to access the deeper stuff I have to offer.   I probably do need to work to trust the notion that I can be liked and not have to sell out my deeper struggle.

To do that, though, I need to get over my need to scream into the void, to brutally and explicitly share my experience in the world.  I need to heal some, be nourished some, be affirmed some.

That is still a struggle.

 

 

Nature Stories

Some people from a local pagan styled spiritual meetup were lovely enough to welcome me to their pre-Samhain meeting last week, a chance to talk about those who have passed through the boundary that gets thin this time of year.

I offered a few insights during the event.   They asked me if I would be interested in doing a presentation at one of their monthly meetings.  What would I say to this group?

Most of them identify their relationship with spirit as “nature centred.”   Animals, sky, sea, terrain and the diversity of life are the images they use to share what is real, eternal and potent.

I love nature too, but the nature I most revere is the nature we all share: human nature.  I know that for some human nature and the society humans have built seems corrupt and soulless, but where does the soul reside if not in our nature?

The big difference between humans and any other animal we know of on the earth, even whales and elephants, is that humans have created a symbolic language.   We are the only storytellers, as far as we know, starting with oral traditions and moving to a great written & dramatic heritage.

When pagans talk about nature, it isn’t nature as biology that they revere, analyzing the habits of animals or the structure of plants, rather it is nature as symbol that is powerful to them.    They take the stories, the tales, the legends of humans which use the world around us as symbol to claim something that they find pure, essential and potent.

The tales of the rabbit, hawk or snake are not from the tongues of those creatures, rather they are from the voices of humans who saw those animals and imbued them with spirit, with the spirit that threaded through their own human heart & brain, through their own human society & culture.

It is the meaning of the story, not its symbols, where power resides.   This is how Joseph Campbell could look at mythology across cultures, examining the stories humans tell to convey meaning in a symbolic way, and find connections, shared truths, across the world and across history.   The characters in the stories may be specific to our location and cultural context, but the content of the story is universal, directly out of the one human nature that we all share.

Our calling is to tell the old stories in new language, the language of where we are now.   This not only makes the wisdom continually fresh and accessible, it also demands that we own the stories deep in our soul.   We cannot just repeat the words, we have to internalize the meaning, integrate it with our own experience, and create our own symbolic interpretation of essential and traditional human knowledge.

All human stories are nature stories, attempts to capture the nature of humans in symbolic language.  The more time we spend being obsessed with the symbols used, the less time we spend opening to the human nature captured in the tales.

Too often, humans choose to revere the ladder rather than where that ladder can take us.  It is not the smells & bells, the symbols of our shared structures of belief that are the powerful part.   They are just means to an end, a structure that lets us climb to a higher view and a deeper understanding.

When I speak about my own spiritual journey, people are often surprised by my very personal cultural references.   I collect stories, stories with meaning, and they become how I hold what is important close to me. They are my own nature stories, moments that remind me of the continuous common humanity that threads through and connects us all.

My journey has been about claiming my own nature from the social conventions and expectations placed on me because of my history and my biology.   I needed to find ways to understand, cleanse and focus the truth in my heart, to become a “stand-up” version of me who didn’t just respond to others but who trusted her own nature.     To move beyond corruption & venality to integrity & compassion is not easy, especially while other people have not yet done the healing, but it seems the only way to claim a full and blessed human life.

That hasn’t been an easy or simple journey.   It wasn’t just my nature I had to learn about, it was my shared nature, the nature that connects me with all other humans.   I need to move past simple groupings of us and them, needed to move beyond comfortable boundaries to engage continuous common humanity.

I needed to move beyond symbol to meaning, not using words as barriers but rather using truth as connection.  I may be essentially different from any other human ever, with my own very unique story, but I am also fundamentally the same as any other human ever, sharing the same human nature.

Nature is wonderful.   As humans, we are not separate from nature, we are profoundly and deeply a part of that nature, just another creature living on this Earth.

Blessed Be.

PerForming Ourselves

“…one of the differences between straight society and queer society, queer culture or queer consciousness, is that we have a recognition that we form ourselves.
At almost every crucial moment of our lives we have to construct ourselves, construct other ways of being.”

— Joan Nestle, in “I’ll Be the Girl,” from FEMME: Feminists, Lesbians & Bad Girls (Edited by Laura Harris & Elizabeth Crocker)

Halloween has always been the holiday for queer people.   It is the moment where we can show ourselves in the world, our deep nature masquerading as play.

Normative identities are issued to us, off the rack, with some allowance for tailoring them to fit.   They mark us as a follower, a consumer of the current and conventional.

Queer identities, though, must be created from whole cloth, cobbled together from bits of this and that we have collected through the years.    They are always bespoke and one-off, fitting no one but us.

Playful moments are always performative moments.    We try on something that we don’t yet own in the world but which still represents what we know in ourselves.   We explore possibilities and directions, new ways to invoke our power in the world.

I once worked hard to champion Halloween parties where you didn’t just come in costume, playing yourself against some wacky clothes, but rather where you came in character, playing a very different version of yourself.    People around here, though, didn’t seem to get the point, much preferring to hold on very tight to their current persona.

Every new incarnation of ourselves, even for just a moment, let us explore a new way to be in the world.   For queers, as Ms. Nestle notes, this construction is an inescapable requirement of finding a way to be ourselves in the world.

Back in my day, this requirement was more acute.   As there are more and more images of lesbian and gay people in the mainstream, many who would previously have to tailor their expression for their own queerness are now struggling to tailor themselves to fit into more standardized representations.

While I understand this urge to convention, I understand playfulness of expression as the way we swing the pendulum wide, finding a new centre for ourselves.    As children, we learned how to fake it until you make it, becoming new over and over again while we explored our possibilities through play.    Why should that process stop as we are need to find new ways to being that represent who we are today, ways that honour our gains and our losses?

Queers are not the only people who have to create bespoke lives.  There was no obvious pattern to become Winston Churchill or  Oprah, either.   You can be pulled to a bold, unique, personal performance of humanity for many reasons.   In the end, it is the people who succeed in writing new rules, not those who slavishly follow the old ones, who will find the greatest success in the world.

Owning our own constructed performance in the world is the only way we can break the bounds of convention and expectation in this world to become powerfully ourselves.

The willingness to try the improbable in order to achieve the impossible, to play beyond comfort, is the only way to find what works and what doesn’t in constructing a new way of being.

I hope, during this Halloween moment, that you take a moment to play with the improbable possibilities of a new you, showing a new face, attempting a new set of choices, which stretch the bounds of your habitual, everyday performance.   May you tighten the corset a bit in order to loosen the girdle of expectations, finding that you can break the bounds of convention and be more potently and playfully you.

And, I hope, you have quite a laugh while doing so.

Inside The Rock

The Inuit have an approach to carving, one shared with many other cultures.   They believe that the image already exists in the stone.   Their job is to take the other bits away.

For people who learned to create with Play-Doh, this doesn’t make sense.  They know how to make a sculpture by adding bits to the shape, extending and moulding it.

In shaping a life, the same approaches apply.

Do we take what we have and add to it, put another layer over it, create something between what we have now and what we imagine ourselves being?    Is the proper approach to creation making a mask, something to cover what we want to hide, something in the shape of what we think is an ideal us?

Or do we take what we have and remove the bits that have been laid on, the bits that are not who we really are? Do we assume that during a lifetime, we have become encrusted with an agglomeration of social expectations, training, and habits, much like a city construction wall becomes piled thick with posters?

The removal approach can seem terrifying.   One slip and we might cut away something important, something essential in the stone.   Adding seems much safer, at least until the weight of our additions causes the material to slip and we have to think about the underlying structure, the armature underneath.

In sculpture, the voids are at least as important as the remaining material, maybe more.  Voids create lightness and elegance, piercing and penetrating to reveal shape and texture.

Humans are also defined by our voids.   Our spaces between create the structure of our approach to the world, not only making our weaknesses but also our strengths.   Every gift we have is both a blessing and a burden, giving us unique abilities and causing us unique problems.

The social approach to normalize everyone becomes a challenge in this regard.   We are often told that we must work on our weaknesses in an attempt to become cross-trained and interchangeable with other people.   It is easy to find someone’s flaws and point them out, easy to think that is the most kind thing we can do for other people.   After all, don’t they want to be whole and well rounded?

Focusing not on our weaknesses but rather on our strengths takes a different mindset.   It requires seeing people as unique and powerful, requires a belief that the best thing that we can do is to help them polish, aggrandize and strengthen their gifts as a way to strengthen the power of the whole.

For a culture that works in village based units, this makes perfect sense.   We don’t need interchangeable people, we need a wide range of strong skills, even if that also means we have a wide range of weaknesses.   The strength of us is in our complimentary skills, in the unit, not in the normalization of one individual.

Machine made cultures see this differently.   Iconoclasts are a pain, regularity makes things simple, following the strict rules in the franchise handbook.

In the end, humans create lives using both techniques.   We need to pull away our weaknesses to create a strong framework and then layer on skills and cultural conventions to flesh out our roles in the world.   We are not either-or people.

For many people, though, getting stripped down to their bare skeleton, having the bits they have accumulated in an attempt to create a pretty façade is a tough ask.   We have spent years gathering, moulding, so the call to peel that back, searching for the rot and weakness in our underlying armature is hard.

Getting older, though, requires this process.   We can’t just continue to imagine that we can be anyone we want to be.   Instead, we have to take a hard look at who we really are, have to make hard choices about what is solid, powerful and flawed, what is flimsy, rotting and outdated.

The notion that we have have to go back and throw away what we loved, that we have to kill our darlings, that we have to expose our weaknesses to reveal our strengths is very hard.  Rejoicing in bits we used to see as artifacts of our sickness and victim-hood is not something that is easy to do.

In the end, though, we are not who we wish to be, not the way we have tried to homogenize and surface ourselves to look flawless in the world.

We are the image in the rock and our voids, shorn of the bits that are not us, show the gifts we have in the world, become the matrix for the jewels of a lifetime.

The goal of a lifetime is not to become a rock encrusted with crud.   Rather it is to become a pebble shaped by a lifetime in the river, smoothed and polished by crashes and comfort to reveal a beautiful, revealed inner shape.

Our voids are the other side of our strengths.  Only by letting the filler drop away can we end up revealing and revelling in the elegant shape left by the mark of our creator and a lifetime of very personal choices.

We are not our shell.   We are what starts locked inside, only to be exposed by the process of living a human life, letting the false drop away, becoming boldly and beautifully ourselves.

What a delight to find that we were in there all the time.

Not Spokesperson

“You are a very articulate and thoughtful spokesperson for transgender people and for the LGBTQ community in general.”

I was pleased to see Sharon Stuart again this week, a bigendered person whose work with Phyllis Frye on legal issues around transgender has been fundamental to much of the changes that have come in the past decade.

It was very nice that she valued my contribution at the forum we attended.   I really appreciate it when we build each other up rather than tear each other down, spreading the jam around and encouraging the best from others.

When I get called a spokesperson, though, I get uncomfortable.  A spokesperson is seen to represent the views of a group.    When someone who sees themselves as a member of that group disagrees with what the “spokesperson” says, they can get angry and heated.

To me, a spokesperson is an official position, conveying the official view of an organization.   It is a job of service, always accountable to the organization and its values.   I have done that work in the past, speaking with the corporate voice, and while I respect it, there is no corporation backing me now.

I speak for me.   I express my own experience and my own understandings.  Yes, I work hard to make sure that I am aware of and respectful to the experiences and understandings of other transpeople, shaping my words to allow considerate space for their narratives,  but I do not, do not ever, claim to speak for anyone else but me.

There was a time when I wanted to be objective and rational when communicating about trans.   I wanted to be scholarly, professional, distanced.   I wanted to work in theory, not story.

The limits of that approach quickly began to show.   At the core, transgender is about desire, about some deep need of the heart to show its truth.   Transgender is not a clinical issue that can be medicalized or codified, because dissecting it always ends up squeezing the life out of it, and transgender is in that soul, that life.

Trans 101 session that start with separating transpeople have real limits.   So do attempts to create spectrums that try to delineate ranges.   The intent may be good, creating shared language, but in my experience the effect is chilling, taking the real human needs out of the heart of transgender nature.

Transgender people need to tell our stories.   We need to learn to tell them in a broader context, using clear and precise language which keeps our own narratives in respectful relationship with transpeople who make very different choices, choices we would never make for ourselves.

Internalized transphobia keeps us apart.   I asked someone today who was the person who made them the most uncomfortable at the transgender support group they went to last night.   I knew that the person who squicked them the most was the person who was struggling with the same issues she was fighting.   What we resist in ourselves, we find really irritating in others, which tends to make us refuse to respect their choices, even their choices of rationalization and denial.

My own queerness is often either challenging or incomprehensible to transpeople who are still resisting their own queerness.   They end up eliminating, minimizing or surfacing it in their view of me, reducing my narrative to one that supports their own current worldview rather than expanding their vision to respect my story.   They cut me down to their chosen size and shape, which leaves me stung and upset.

I don’t ever claim to speak for anyone but myself.   That is more than enough of a challenge for me to do in this world.

There are people, I know, who do value what I have to say.   They hear my stories and they get clear reflections of their own struggles, experiences and views.    They feel that my words respect and value their own experience of their lives. \

These people want my expressions to be heard more widely, to be more known and understood in the world because they believe that my words will help them expand and explain their views in a bigger world.   My communication resonates with them, so they are willing to grant me the right to be, at least on a limited basis, a spokesperson for them in the world.

One of my first experiences with this was back in 1997 at a local event facilitated by the National Coalition Building Institute.   Many of the transpeople there came up to me and told me how pleased they were to have me speak about trans, and how distressed they were when other participants spoke.  I could support a range, but the other transpeople got squicked by each other.

As gratified as I am that people I respect will encourage me to speak up, lending their support and encouraging me to speak for them in the world,  I know that, in the end, they are the only ones who can fully speak for themselves.     I am not their spokesperson, nor would I want to be, because I value their strong and experienced voices too much to replace them.

This is, of course, part of my resistance to trying to identify transgender as a group identity rather than a queer, individual one.   We each have claimed the contents of our own heart over the expectations and conventions of the world, and those hearts need to sing, to speak, to dance, to draw, to shout, to write, to create their own potent expression in the world, glittering with all the pearls and jewels of a hard, brave and bold personal journey.

When I walk into spaces that are supposed to be trans affirming and trans voices are not valued and aggrandized, I find that chilling.  I do know how many transvoices are muffled or still strangulated with the experience of the closet, know that we each have been broken some by a society that thinks it is appropriate and kind to try and break the transgender spirit inside.   I also know that unless we value the voices of others, we can never really value our own voice.

I speak for myself, not the spokesperson for anyone but me.   I am glad to be seen as articulate and thoughtful, even “eloquent,” glad that others see my contributions as valuable and worth their support, but I do not speak for them.

They can each speak for themselves.   And as long as they stay to the heart, telling their own positive story rather than their rationalizations and connivances,  their negations and dismissals, I am very happy to listen and let their narrative help make my expression of my own story more clear and connected.

Political Suicide

Transgender Day Of Remembrance, (TDOR)the event Gwen Smith started in 1998 (and I helped a little bit at that time too) will  probably be marked in the area again this year.

I probably won’t hear about what is being planned, because the event is coordinated now by professional activists, mostly from a local organization that supports LGBT people of colour and by a statewide political lobbying organization that also is responsible for divvying up state government funds to groups across the state.   I was in the senate lobby when they got a sexual orientation non discrimination act that deliberately excluded protection for gender identity in 2002, promising they would come right back and cover queers.  There will still be no statewide legal protection for trans people in 2014.

These organizations have trouble dealing with individual transpeople, preferring to deal with groups and people who belong to them.   They are focused first on group identities because group identities have political clout that queer individuals never will.   Too queer and you are just going to gum up the works, just like those damn bisexuals who are too creepy to just pick a side and stick with it.

Now, the National LGBTQ Task Force (NGLTF) has decided that TDOR isn’t enough, isn’t the vehicle that serves their needs.  They are having an action on November 18, two days before the annual TDOR, on Trans Lives Matter, a part of their Stop Trans Murders campaign.

I got a pitch on a local list to create an action from a professional trans activist who used to work for the statewide group.   When I asked why they felt the need to do this around TDOR, I got reprimanded for my tone and asked who I was.   Challenging someone’s  standing to speak is the easiest way to dismiss challenges.

Is there an “epidemic of violence and murder targeting transgender people?”   Is it different from the challenges that TDOR has been addressing for the past 16 years?

I was always a challenger to the transpeople are murdered at extreme rates thesis.   I wrote No Jihad in 2006 and included a poem I wrote for TDOR 1999.

Professional activists, though, know what pushes buttons.   They know how to collect and collate power by effective marketing.   That is, after all, their job.

I remember when TBB confronted the head of Human Rights Campaign (HRC) when they addressed Southern Comfort Conference.  He came over and sat next to us, trying to smooth things over.   He was glib and convincing, even after having sold out transpeople in the past to achieve other goals.  I looked at him closely, thinking “My, that is a lovely suit he is wearing.  You know that no transpeople paid for a suit that nice.”

This weekend, I heard a pastor who leads a “More Light” church that claims to welcome LGBT people say that she has a problem with “non-passing transpeople,” especially those who will never pass, because they are too disruptive to her congregation.  I watched a professional transgender organizer from inside her denomination refuse to confront her on the transphobia of that position, the rejection of queer.

The notion that transpeople are only appropriate and useful if they assimilate well into a group identity, merging into current structures, is one hugely transphobic.   It was what kept transpeople hidden, was what doctors enforced when they demanded gender tests before supporting transition, was what so many transgroups demanded for entry.

Jamison Green said it so well.  “When you hear the word trans, open your mind to a person who walked outside of social convention and gendered expectations to claim their own unique path.”

This bold, unique walking away from group identity to be powerfully and purposefully ourselves is both awesome and political suicide.   Politics is a game of numbers, numbers of dollars and numbers of votes, so to keep your budget full, you gotta keep people in line, because having them run around like cats is not useful.

Iconoclasts and bold voices need to be silenced in favour of the public platform.   The organization has to be paramount, and if that means creating competing remembrance celebrations so they can have control over their own, so be it.

Paid lobbyists don’t really want an educated and thoughtful public.   They want a compliant and controlled mass, skillfully marking down strong and contrarian voices as losers, wackos and nut jobs.    You don’t want to be like them, they tell the impressionable, so make sure you are politically correct like us, one of the people in the right, the ones who can look down and dismiss the weak-thinking crackpots.

My crackpot pedigree is strong and solid.   My queer, eremetic, theological bent mixes nicely with the stand up traditions of my father.    I’ve been talking about transgender as a personal journey since 1994 in public, though when I was in eighth grade I refused to give a counsellor an easy code to my identity, saying that my highest goal was to be myself.

If we force transpeople into identities then they can never find their own centre.  For transpeople, the freedom to be non-passing, to be not clearly identified as members of one group or the other, is the only freedom that can lead us beyond history, convention, expectation, social pressure and political demands and allow us to blossom as the unique and brilliant people that exist in our heart.

For professional activists, though, individual transcendence is not what they are out to support.  It’s not what their employers, the people who have political goals, pay them to make happen.   It’s not the way they measure the results of the power game being played by masters.

Wrangling people into compliance with what is being sold is the name of the game, best done with the appearance of real concern and sharing, but only successful when people come to the proper beliefs.   Yes, everyone, share your ideas, and then we will tell you which are right and important.  Mental moulding disguised as consensus building, using social pressure to get you conform your voice to the group, a group led by a sanctified someone who already knows the deeper agenda.

I really wanted to be a pol when I was a kid.   I did serious campaign work at high levels.  I know why my voice isn’t respected by professional hacks & flacks.   They have their job to do, and strong voices just get in the way.   I understand their techniques.  If they can’t be controlled, then they can be left on the margins while the pros gin up the centre, get the group mind moving in ways that achieve planned goals.   If I want to challenge them, then I need to have my own group, some bargaining chips, and that is not where I have been moving.

A flack loves someone with a short attention span who can be influenced by emotion. Someone with a strong personal sense of integrity and a clear vision of their own knowledge and beliefs is much more challenging to all the manipulators, one reason that transpeople who have claimed their own authenticity beyond fear are just easier to marginalize and shut down.

One argument goes that only by riding the coattails of the big, well-funded, professional lobbying organizations can transpeople get what they need in society.

In any case, after years of us being the “too queers” that could be compromised for bigger group goals, the political pros have finally come around to transgender as the cause of the week.  All they need to do to sell it to the country is to present it in a clear, compelling package that their audiences can gasp.

“Trans People Matter!  Stop the epidemic of violence and murder against transpeople!”   Send your cheque today to help these abject freaks who threatened with horrible things!

But let non-passing transpeople into your church, where you might have to open to what they offer?   They better learn to fit in better and not scare the children first!

Transgender is a bold claim that the exceptional content of individual hearts matters more than simplified and imposed group identity.

Transgender says that the creativity locked inside our diverse humans is the way that we open up a new future beyond dated conventions.

Or, maybe, transgender is just another device to keep pols and lobbyists working the system for the benefit of…  well, probably not you.

Cute Denied

Cute doesn’t mean anything to an Aspie.

My mother was clear from the start: life was all about her.   We were just put in her life to stop her from being happy.   Everything was put in her life to stop her from being happy.   If we really loved her, we would make her happy.   Failure was the only option in her life, so it was the only option for those around her, too.

My father was always happy and loving. but he was also always disconnected from what other people were feeling.  His primary role was to try and make my mother happy, but that, of course, was an impossible task, because only she could own her own happiness.   When I came back to take care of them for their last decade, my goal was to help my father take care of my mother so she didn’t break him with her needs and demands.

I started having to take care of my parents and siblings from a very young age.  There was no place in my family for a childhood.

Most children, at least those who are not adultified early, get a time when they are seen as cute.    They are loved, enjoyed, and valued just for who they are, not having to worry about doing things right or managing the distress of a parent.   Getting what they need, including love, is not conditional and demanding, rather it is their birthright.

I was in a bar with TBB.   TBB was having a great time, between happy hour and heavy pours.   I was less open, less safe, less relaxed.

“The bartender knows that I belong here,” TBB said to me. “He isn’t so sure that you belong here.”

I wasn’t at all sure I belonged there, either.  The bar is a place where cute reigns, where people let their hair down and just become one of the party.   I have no idea how to do that, how to trust mt own cuteness, because from a very, very young age, cute was denied to me.

Most people can’t imagine the experience of never being allowed to own their own cuteness.   If you cannot believe that you might actually be adorable, how can you ever just let someone adore you?

My sister and I have spoken about this and identified where this deficit cost us dearly, affecting all my siblings.    Not owning our own cute cut us off from other people in a profound and disturbing way.  We could never just trust in our own attractiveness, our own native playfulness, our own cuteness.

There are many deficits that you can make up for with a conscious reconstruction of your life, thinking things through, understanding deep context.   Being denied your fundamental cute, however, is not one of those things.  Counsellors are used to helping people move beyond cute to thoughtful living, but helping people trust in and own their own cuteness isn’t something they know how to do.

I tried to help my sister by shoving my cheek in front of her face as she was leaving, demanding that she kiss it.   She would mock disgust, but she understood that I wanted her to think of herself as someone who was cute enough to kiss someone’s cheek.    I wanted her to feel safer in acting cute.

The lesson of not trusting my own cute has been reinforced in many ways over my lifetime.   I know that people have tried to explain that my performance of self didn’t fit, that I wasn’t really just a crusty curmudgeon, that I was cute on some level, but it was impossible for me to own that, especially when I kept having to go back to my parents and keep my defences in place.

Those defences, of course, were all centred around the denial of cuteness.   I learned early that being cute would get me creamed, so instead of being flirtatious and appealing, I had to be smart, cunning and even manipulative.    It’s not that I wasn’t cute, rather it was that I had learned to not trust cute, seeing it as inherently dangerous and flawed.   I was surrogate-spoused by my mother which reached a zenith with open robes in my teens, unpleasant and terrifying.

People doing “law of attraction” style programs are asking you to depend on your essential attractiveness, your essential cuteness.  For those of us who were denied cute, for whom cute seemed to be a trick, it is easy to see that approach as a steaming pile of kaka.   While any approach can be misused, there are benefits in opening up and trusting your own attraction, your own cute.

Having the cute squeezed out of you, or at least having the freedom to trust it taken away from a very young age, it becomes almost impossible to get it back, to have what most other humans take for granted.   From experience, I tell you that most people don’t understand how anyone could be completely deprived of knowing that, somewhere, they are cute.

When other people go through cute removing transitions — aging, smart, management, transgender, whatever — at least they have a reservoir to return to, some muscle memory of a time when they were cute.   If you got cute punched out of you early, that’s not as simple.

Cute doesn’t mean anything to an Aspie.  It just doesn’t exist on their radar.  Living in a world where other people value cute can be frustrating to them, so frustrating that they get angry at cute and the expectation of it.

My siblings and I not only didn’t have our cuteness valued, we learned early that it was a trap.    I’m comfortable with the fact I learned to want to be respected more than to be liked — I think that’s a good balance — but not learning that I was likeable, adorable, cute left me with a real deficit that still cripples me.

Where does a grown-up go to learn to trust their own cuteness for the first time?

Hater Transcend

A true trans anecdote:

A transwoman, a musician for over thirty five years, transitions to living as a woman in her 50s.

She gets the opportunity to play a three song set in Las Vegas.  Getting up with her guitar, she sings original works.

When she comes off stage, she sees a man waiting for her. tears in his eyes.

“When you came on stage,” he tells her, “I thought you were disgusting.   I started talking with my friends about how we were going to follow you afterwards and beat you up.

“But when you sang those songs, my heart was touched.   I felt ashamed that I had even thought of plans to destroy you.”

“Well,” said the transwoman.   “I’m sure glad I am talented.”

You choose:

1) This is a lovely story about how someone standing in authenticity and singing their truth opened the heart of a hater.

2) This is a horrible story about someone feeling entitled to project their own fears onto a visible transwoman in a dangerous and threatening way.

For transwomen, who almost never have the safety of a group, this is a real experience of life.

Queerest

It is very challenging to be the queerest person in the room.   That’s not to say that it isn’t valuable to the group, doesn’t have some rewards, but it is challenging.

Because it is so challenging, most people work hard to avoid being the queerest person in the room. They modulate themselves, adjusting to be appropriate for the space, keeping parts of themselves hidden.

While this choice removes contention and challenge in the group, maintaining easy comfort, it also robs the group of much of the capacity that people have to offer.   It removes energy and opportunities for growth.

One thing that visible transpeople do is change the queer boundary.   When people feel the queerness in the room is about three, they will usually work hard to stay at two.   Let a very queer person into the space, a six or seven, and then people can loosen up, show their individuality.   All of a sudden they can relax and show the four that they really are.

For those who want to keep groups quiet and complacent, this is a bad thing.   They want to maintain an enclave for the compliant, not a sanctuary for the creative.

For those who want vibrant, lively, growing and healthy groups, though, they know that moving the creative and queer energy levels up is the only way to keep things fresh and throbbing.    It is the only way to release the most energy in the group, fostering innovation by always affirming the new.

Queer is messy, no doubt about that, just like any other kind of creative expression.   It requires being willing to risk failure in an iterative quest to find what will work.  Queer demands bold attempts and the ability to learn from everything.

Inside LGBT spaces, one of the fundamental challenges is always “How queer is too queer?   How queer is not queer enough?”   Some people tend towards the tame side, working to assimilate, while others tend towards the wild side, being highly individualistic.   It becomes easy for both sides to think the other is just doing it wrong.

The way liberation has happened is always the same.   The icebreakers move the boundaries, and the networkers then move in behind and shore up the gains.  The approaches are interlocking and complimentary, not separate and contradictory.

There is a cost, though, for being the queerest person in the room.

Some people may try to erase and silence you, denying not only your right to speak but also your essential humanity.    They decide that it is not proper to be that queer not proper to show that difference. so taking a way your standing, driving you away. is a holy duty.

If you are the queerest person in the room, people can often decide that you are so strong that you do not need their kindness, compassion and support.   Instead of standing by you they put you on a kind of pedestal, dehumanizing you in the process.

It is a real challenge to support and encourage creative queerness to exist in your group.  The benefits may seem more than the cost if you want to create an enclave, isolated and unchallenging.

If you want to create a sanctuary for the incredibly diverse and potent creativity that humans can bring to the table when they start exposing their gifts rather than hiding them, a place where everyone feels safe to let loose and be there best, is there any other choice than moving the goalposts by deliberately including the queer?

Welcoming Capacity

“As a pastor, I have found,” said one woman, “that if you welcome a person from a place of capacity, engaging what they have to offer, rather than from a place of need, deciding how you can solve their problems with your answers, that they tend to open up more.”

Absolutely.

What she didn’t go on to explain was why greeting them with a question — what are you bringing to us? — is so much more difficult than greeting them with an answer.

With an answer, you are asserting your own beliefs, staying in control.

With a question, you are opening to change, being willing and even desirous of having your understanding changed, your group changed by the contributions of another.   You come from a place of openness and vulnerability, expanding your world by adding a new relationship, a new view and new gifts to it.

“What do you want?” a pastor asked me once.

“I want what everyone wants,” I replied.

“Surely everyone wants different things,” he sniffed.

“I want to be seen, accepted and valued for my special and unique contributions to the community.”

He thought for a moment, then agreed.  “Yes,” he said.  “That is what everyone wants.”

“The most painful thing about trans is not to be able to give your gifts and have them accepted,” I wrote in 2002.

For me, the essence of queer, of engaging teachy preaching over preachy preaching, is the willingness to open to seeing the world in a new way and being transformed, growing, through that experience.   The preachy way is to impose your own beliefs on the world, but the teachy way is to never stop learning new ways to have your beliefs sharpened and deepened, learning to put your values into practice.

One pastor decided to tell us that she had a bad experience with a non-passing transperson who was just too needy and demanding.  Her question was about how to not have to take on the burden of broken people, even the challenge of entering their journey and helping them find the resources that they need.

I am not safe in any community that seeks to erase my own nature for the comfort of the group.   I understand the pull towards stability and the apparent peace of non-challenge, but I know that is a false and vain comfort.   I am a non-passing transperson and to ask me to work to pass for the comfort of the group is to ask me to conceal and deny part of my truth.

“I was at a service and a transperson read the lesson,” the same pastor said, “and I felt so open, safe and welcomed.   This person crossed many barriers, of class and race and status and was so embraced by the church that I knew that I would also be embraced, that I was safe there.”

The difference between coming into a place where you have to be the one to fight to open the hearts and minds of those around you and coming into a space where those hearts and minds are already open, people having done the work to be inclusive, queer and valuing of the wide possibilities of humanity is heart rendering.   If no one has been able to open them before, what chance do you have?

When we welcome someone from capacity and not need, we expand and build our world, making it a little bigger and a little stronger.   We also make it a little more messy and a little more challenging, but that is always a side effect of growth and healing.    We cannot stay neat and proper and also open to new creation and new compassion.

As a transperson,  the most difficult thing is engaging other people’s fears, as I also said in 2002.  The fear that their neat and comfortable world may be disrupted by people who have walked right through the wall that separates the genders, that they may have to recalibrate what “normal” is to them is one that is very hard for a visibly queer person to engage.    We become the problem, the target, rather than them owning their own fears.

I know I am gifted with much to offer.  I have had to do the hard work of accepting my own queer gifts, that big bold painting as I wrote in 1994.   Finding a way to return those hard won gifts is always a challenge, as Joseph Campbell reminds us.

The gift of gracious receiving
is one of the greatest gifts
we can give anyone.
— Mister Fred Rogers

The greatest gift we can give one another
is rapt attention to one another’s existence.
— Sue Atchley Ebaugh

Opening to the capacity of another person isn’t just a gift to them, it is a gift to ourselves and to our community, expanding both.

Scary Tranny

You know, I suppose there are cute transwomen in the world, but I have long known that I am not one of them.

Years ago, after a Halloween party, I did the work of guiding a fellow so he could get his van out of a parking space.   I was a vision in sliver motorcycle vinyl, all zippers and fishnets .

“Thank you!” he told me.  “I’d kiss you if you weren’t so scary!”

After meeting me, Jeffery Roberson told a friend of mine that he found me “scary bright.”  When the amazing Varla Jean Merman‘s alter ego finds you scary, well, honey, you know that you are scary.

Even the arrogant Russian pulmonologist who misdiagnosed my father in ICU two years ago remembers me, according to my sister who saw him last week.

And tonight, at a Presbyterian presentation on Transgender Identities, Alex Patchin McNeill knew that I was trouble the moment he looked into my eyes.  I eventually got some thanks for my contribution, but the pastor of my local church who was down on “non-passing transpeople,” never chose to connect with me after I made my discomfort about that judgment clear.

The most valuable commodity in the world is human attention.   We usually dole it our parsimoniously, trying to interpret other people in our context rather than wasting the attention on really hearing and reflecting the other person.

When people threaten to demand too much attention, too much engagement, too much transformation, most people learn how to shut those people down and assign their own meaning to them.

I don’t know quite why I am scary.

I’m big boned, yes, which doesn’t help with cuteness, but more than that, I suspect, I look actively present in every moment.   You can tell I am seeing you, probably more of you than you intended to show.   I’m not looking for your affirmation or friendship, I am looking for respect.

One of the issues tonight was aging, how people expect older people to be either caretakers or be abject old fools.   Few people know how to reach into a mature life with grace and empathy, instead assuming that older people should take care of them.    So many people expect transpeople to do the same thing, be obligated to be their guide to a challenging and  scary subject, either aging or transgender.

When I end up opening my mouth, though, I end up speaking like a writer, with grace and authority, clear and sharp.   Somehow, years of exploring and polishing my own thoughts tend to leave me with that skill.  Ask enough questions and you end up with a few good answers.    People who see clearly and then speak those truths are scary, just as my parents proved when I was eight and they decided my family nick name should be “Stupid” in an attempt to devalue me.

In my family, my Aspergers family, I learned very early that cute just didn’t cut any ice.   I was left to fend for myself from as early as I can remember.  I  fought with and for my family from an early age, and that didn’t stop until 2012 when I helped my parents die.

I am not unpleasant or nasty.  I know how to be appropriate.  I am very good at using humour to make a point.   I do, however, know how to ask just the wrong question at just the wrong time, one that shakes up convention and rationalization to cut to the core.   Pleasantries don’t interest me, transformation does.

I have spent my life being a scary tranny, making jokes to an audience too afraid to laugh.    It would be lovely to think that some people see me as cute or at least useful, as one mother did tonight as we chatted about the issues around having a queer child, but I am more used to people not getting the joke.

My power is real and is seen, I know.  It just isn’t always engaged, especially by people who feel the fear and need to stay where they are.  I will go there and not back down.   In fact, I want to go to those deep places where emotion roils, because those are the places where healing is needed.   I show the scars and the wisdom of that journey, show my willingness to engage in every moment.

I’m amazing to be in conversation with if you want to grow, annoying as hell if you need to stay where you are, as I am often reminded.   Death and rebirth served here, often far too much for even the closest friend.

I am a big person, with a big brain and a big spirit,, paying big attention, and that can often seem to be too much for people.

In the end, though, life is, as I told the therapist when I was 11, about being who you are.  I am who I am.    And that seems to be a very queer, very challenging, scary tranny.

Avoid Trans

If at all possible, you should avoid being trans in this world.   Being trans is just a real pain in the ass that creates lots of challenging problems.

I suspect that truth is obvious to most people.   Trans may be liberating and transcendent, but it is easy to understand that the downsides are not simple to negotiate.  Now, that is much less true than it was in my day, liberation having come a a long way, but trust me, it is still plenty tough.

If everybody knows that avoiding being trans is the best plan if you can at all manage it, then why are some people still publicly, actively transgender in the world?

The answer is simple.   People who are out as trans, even if they don’t want to be out as trans, can’t find a way to avoid being trans in the world.

You can pretty well bet that they did try to find a way to avoid being trans in the world, tried to avoid having to be out and visible as trans.  We have each tried on lots of different roles, working hard to fine tune them with rationalizations, defences and performance tricks that avoid having to be seen as trans in the world.

What we have found is that as many problems as being trans creates in building relationships in the world, making other people less than comfortable around us and making us feel unsafe around other people, trying to hide our transgender nature, trying to hide the true shape of our heart causes even more problems.

We learned that entering the baffling, uncertain and breathtaking terrain of transgender is, in the end, easier and better than avoiding it.   The truth is out there and skirting around it just to try and make life simpler doesn’t change that truth.

The people you see as trans in the world are trans in the world because we couldn’t seem to find a way to avoid being trans.   You can say that we should have tried harder, then, but in the end, though, that choice is not up to you.

The most wearing part about being trans is negotiating the thicket of terrors and boobytraps and internalized fears and social pitfalls that are all designed to make it easier to avoid transgender than to engage it.

Being truthful, authentic, integrated and living with integrity is actually easier, better and more fun than learning how to hide and deny your own heart.  Trying to explain that to people who would rather you just shut the fuck up about it, rather you just agree to leave the nice solid barriers they set in their life unchallenged, well, that is a real pain in the ass.

The ultimate trans surgery is pulling the stick out of your own ass.  “Ooh, that sounds painful!” remarked one gay bartender who heard me say that.  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but it’s much worse leaving it in there.”   He took my point.

While removing that stick is hard because we have to do it ourselves, the real question is how the broom stick got there in the first place.   How did we end up getting all jammed up, stiffened and constrained, twisted and uncomfortable, and then how did we learn just to accept that rod as part of our everyday experience of life?

It’s easy.   We were taught that if at all possible, you should avoid being trans in this world.   Being trans is just a real pain in the ass that creates lots of challenging problems.   Better the pain the ass that yow accept on your own than one that others end up surprising and beating you with.

There is no transperson in the world who cannot supply you with a long, accurate and tragic list about how being trans in the world is a real pain in the ass.   There is no transperson in the world who cannot show you a map of real scars they have from feeling their transgender nature exposed.

There is also no transperson in the world who cannot tell you about moments of bliss, joy and integration, where all the pieces line up and they feel the bounding freedom of letting their heart be seen in the world.   Trans is about desire, about the heart wanting what it wants, about the way our creator made us.

The challenge is, of course, how to get more of the good, wholesome bits of transgender expression while avoiding the pounding stigma that always threatens to leave us feel ashamed of who we really are.

We have learned that no matter how much we have been told to avoid being trans we can never run away from our own heart.  Our nature is within us, and is not something that we can make go away, no matter how much we try and wall it up.   We aren’t stupid.  If we could avoid being trans, we would do it, but we have tried and failed to amputate our heart and our history.

Instead, we have to learn to avoid beating ourselves up over being trans, stop listening to the bear in the closet, that internal policeman who wants to shame us into self-loathing in an attempt to keep our heart hidden and keep us playing small.

If you can avoid being trans, great.   But if you can’t, if the very attempt to avoid your own trans nature twists you into knots and blows holes in your potential, well, then stop trying to avoid being trans and boldly enter your own nature.   Your happiness is not in how you sacrifice yourself to fit in, your happiness is in how you show your beautiful heart to attract the best to you.

It should be obvious that killing your own nature to satisfy other people’s comfort, to play to the fears and unhealed parts of those around you is not the way to create a full, righteous and happy life, not the way to honour the gifts your creator gave you.

I know the costs of showing trans in the world.   They can hurt, yes.

But the costs of hating your own heart, well, in the end, they are much, much greater.

Never Done

When they outline exercise programs, they usually tell men to do high intensity with moderate repetitions, using more weight and force to build bulk in the muscle.

Women, on the other hand, are told to do moderate intensity exercises with a high number of repetitions to shape long, lean, and flexible muscle tone.

Women’s work, you see, is never done.   Men can do big bursts of heavy work and then rest, but women are expected to continuously do their work, somewhat less strenuous but much more regular, always there.

This difference is seen through all the parts of a woman’s life.   As a mommy, women are always on duty, keeping an eye or an ear out to monitor the situation, doing all the jobs that moms have to tend to, from cooking to cleaning to negotiating to reminding to training and on and on and on.

A woman’s work really is never done.   You see that when families send the kids out into the world.   Men often think that means they can rest more, hitting the couch and finding a favourite TV channel, while women think that means they can finally move beyond mommy and get back to following their own dreams.

For transwomen who worked hard to live as men, this switch to a woman’s regimen is often daunting.   They didn’t learn how to do little things all the time to build a life, instead thinking that doing a few big things and resting was the real way to success.    It becomes easy for them to just want to skip the details, dismiss work that is lower than their status — just women’s work — and just demand that the big picture is all that counts.   They see the men around them still enjoying the privilege of arrogance, doing heavy lifts then bragging about it, and they wonder why they can’t still do the same as women.

Rather than setting an ambitious objective and working towards that, women have learned to commit to the process of continuous improvement.    Small steps in a curving path allow us to take the time to do what is important in the moment, to pay attention and offer the work that is needed right now by the people in front of us.

Details are important to women, as they show with their appearance.   Being aware of details is always work, continuous aware work.

To make the choices of a woman in the world is to embrace the idea that a woman’s work, no matter how small it may seem, has value.   It requires understanding that a woman’s work, serving those she is in relationship with, serving her world and serving her own vision and knowledge is never done.

The difference between gendered behaviour is not prose.   Women can do everything that men can do and vice versa.

The difference between gendered behaviour is poetry.   Women take a different approach, follow a slightly different beat, have different priorities in their approach to tasks.

Those approaches are not contradictory, the are complimentary, polished by thousands of years of human civilization.   Women are the mommies, men are the daddies, and together, with the help of other gender roles, we build a vital community.

Woman’s work is never done.     And women’s work always creates a more detailed, more caring and more beautiful world.

Afraid To Laugh

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
— Voltaire

 

Terrain Of Desire

We have lousy strippers in this area, according to the owner of a new adult boutique who sells to them.   They have little professionalism or ambition.  They are the dregs of strippers.

We have lousy strippers in the area because we have a lousy audience for strippers in the area.   Girls find it hard to make a good living because there aren’t enough patrons, and there are certainly not enough generous patrons, willing to trade cash for attention.

Good strippers end up leaving the area, going where the market values them.  It’s the American ethos of voting with your feet. in this case, those feet are wedged into 5″ heels.

There are so many examples of lack of heat in the area.  People are not encouraging of others.   That means that few step up to take leadership positions.   We drive away the professional or ambitious in all fields, not just adult entertainment.

Sex workers and trans people have at least one thing in common.   We both work with Eros, with desire.

The trans experience is all about desire, a burning desire to move out of our assigned, compulsory gender role to one that more authentically represents and satisfies the content of our heart.

Managing that desire in the context of a full and productive human life is always a challenge.  We can deny it, compartmentalize it, medicalize it, or find other ways to handle it.

The hardest and best way to deal with that desire, of course, is to dive into it, exploring it, swinging the pendulum wide and letting it come back to the centre.   Unless we work to integrate the desire into a balanced and healthy life, it will always be able to throw us off balance, always be a block to the kind of intimacy we need and we crave.

Sex workers have to do the same kind of work.  They need to own their own desire so they can assist others in exploring Eros.   They are professionals of desire, understanding both its excesses and its role in a full and passionate life.

Living with curiosity and reverence for all of human energy, the most sophisticated sex workers are shamans who unlock possibilities and lead others on a journey of self-discovery beyond conventional boundaries. Gender expectations are always played with by sex workers, exaggerating or erasing them to dive deep into the psyche.

The connection between transpeople and sex workers runs deep.   Lots of transpeople make a crust by doing sex work, from phone sex to walking the streets.  Even those of us who don’t choose to do sex work still find moments when we are asked to help probe and explore the erotic details of others, as TBB was revealed as a Goddess of Eros at a  chop house in Charleston earlier this year.

My experience is that women in sex work, especially Dominatrices, have done the kind of work that lets them understand the work I have done.   They have also had to explore their own energy, had to get past being squicked by human desire, had to find a way to be open & receptive while also being centred & strong.

Every dominatrix has to be, at least on some level, a switch.  She needs to be able to accept intense feelings, pleasure & pain, and she needs to know how to invoke them.  This is the feminine way to take control, understanding the experience of those who put their trust in you, using your empathy and compassion to push them beyond what they now see as their limits.   That’s just what mothers do, too.

Domina need to know how to walk into other people’s worlds and shake them up in elegant ways.  This traipsing through others minds is one reason that transpeople are so interesting to them; there is always something new to learn and appreciate when you see the world through very different, very queer eyes.   Tell me stories, yes, then show me how you respond under stress so I can see your real mettle.   Domina know that the brain is always the biggest sex organ.

The reason your Potential Partner Pool (PPP) gets smaller is because it gets deeper.   Instead of being shallow and easy, you become deep and challenging.   That’s why people who, for whatever reason, have faced their own challenges often find each other, feeling the safety of being exposed around someone who has already done their own work, unwiring the buttons, dismantling the fears and getting down to the foundational bedrock of continuous common humanity.   Clearing Eros of twists allows us to and even requires deeper, scarier and more potent intimacy.

For people who need to enter and own their own Eros, often because they have wounds that they need to heal, we become visible in our power, beacons who draw erotic interest from those whose Eros is still walled off.  Often that means we are targets of the acting out of repressed fears, but sometimes that means we connect with others who also have had to go there.

The terrain of desire is a powerful place.

Well, not so powerful in this area.   We have lousy strippers because we have a lousy audience that avoids the heat of Eros.  Oh well.

Reverence

If writing isn’t about reverence, reverently turning the evanescent and ephemeral into our version of the eternal, then what is it about?
— Anne LaMott, Bird By Bird

The notion that art is fundamentally about reverence, being tuned in to an awesome world, gratefully receiving what is around us and being transformed it, seems to be essentially feminine.  Maybe masculine reverence is different, dutifully following a strict set of rules, but Mommy’s approach the world in a more nurturing way.

We take the experience of life in with joy and reverently convert that into art, struggling to convey the details which capture moments of awe.

The human story always brings out my reverence.  When people are open and kind enough to share their stories with me, I always value them.     I know that other artists revere other things — nature, movement, images, etc. — but for me, it is the tales which inform our lives, our theology.

We don’t live in a very reverent world anymore.  Irreverence is much easier and less demanding, as it allows us to mock and reject the potent around us, removing the power to demand attention and change.

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort,
some joke or epigram,
than with any amount of reasoning.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Answers let us be comfortable in our own world.   Questions demand we be open, respectful and reverent to a world that is much bigger than one human’s perception.

To be reverent is to always live in a world that is not totally knowable, a place where we still can be surprised, informed and humbled by that which we have not yet deeply encountered.   You cannot be truly reverent with a closed mind and heart, believing that you already know all you need to know, that any challenges are just noisy distractions.

Reverence is shown in fascination.   To be fascinated requires the willingness to follow your own curiosity, chasing the curious and learning something new.   I am constantly fascinated by other people, wanting to drink them in and having learned how to do so quickly and in detail.  It would be nice if other people were also fascinated by me.

Reverence is shown in gratitude.  To be grateful for the people and events that open you up and help you grow, for the miracles that change your perception of the world is an act of reverence for gifts that you never expected, process that you embrace.

Reverence is at the heart of respect, not just respect for what we already know we like and value, but respect for the broad, queer diversity of the world.

I can’t imagine making art without being based in reverence.  I can’t imagine living life without being based in reverence.

The gifts of a lifetime train and shape us, but so so more gracefully if we approach them with reverence.

Coming From Cold

Warm up.

It’s the first step to so many things, from exercise to performance.   A cold engine runs rough, can’t start purring until it warms up.   Brett Butler said the best advice she ever had about auditioning was to come on like you had just been killing for twenty minute, hot and loose.   TBB and I performed our best after singing showtunes in the 23 story stair shafts of the Portland Hilton.

Women have their own special warm-up game.  A few rounds of “‘Gorgeous!’ ‘No You’re Gorgeous!'” can always heat us up.  Find something to compliment, get it returned, sharing jam to loosen the trepidation, open the flow.

My experience of my life, though, has been very, very cold.   From the Aspergers approach of my parents to my very damaged feet, which always feel frozen, I know cold.

I always start frigid, so cold that I am afraid that, like a wiener dipped in liquid nitrogen, I will crack into shards at the slightest hit.

There are many reasons for this, including training, venue, isolation and attitude.   My heat was cast as sickness from my earliest days, usually by people defending their own coldness.   They need to stay cold, compartmentalized, isolated, frost-stabilized.

I live in a deep freeze, cutting back and scrimping, without reflected enthusiasm or joy.   Exuberance is to be distrusted as a canard, indulgent, immodest and cheap.

Thought is a cold process, chilling down the heat of emotion so it can be explored and managed, and thought was my salvation from a challenging less than childhood.  I learned how to freeze dry emotions and turn them into symbols for dissection and storage, desiccated specimen feelings pressed between blotters and stored in huge mental racks.

Any heat I had was in service, the zest of giving my parents one more good day.  My own life went on ice to do that for a decade.   After they passed, I was placed into a twenty-two month hibernation, enduring on the edge of scarcity.

To warm up, I try and rub ideas together in my brain.  This does produce sparks, but rarely of the warming variety, instead chilling me down farther.   I look for help warming up, but so many helpers seem to think that their job is to offer more contextualizing thought, cooling things down for examination and reorientation.

In the same way that Buddhists have told me that the only way to peace is through detachment, most tell me to cool off more and consider my choices.   For a person whose life has been deep frozen into a state of entropy, suggesting more chilling is just a kind of malpractice.

For a long time I have said that I need the heat of “yes,” need the reflection of the positive, need someone who not only gets my jokes but also laughs at them.

I know how to be cold, stiff, self-conscious and modulated.  I know.

What I don’t know is how to be hot, loose, free and relaxed.

Even when  I do warm a bit, there is always another freeze coming, another run at emotional hypothermia designed to cool off life and create more stasis, more incapacitation.   The frostbite has even become permanent in bits of me, starting with the feet.

My challenge is not to turn off my brain, removing the sharp clarity.   My challenge is to meld that cool with the heat of action that keeps the heart warm, open, resilient and playful.

I am coming from a very, very cold place.

I go back to a very, very cold place that sucks away heat very quickly.

No matter how much I store heat, insulating it by wrapping it in symbol to preserve meaning, the power of heat isn’t just in its meaning, it mostly in the excitement of vibrating atoms that challenge entropy.

Going in cold doesn’t give much leverage for success.

Finding people to share heat with, though, has proven to be difficult.