Displaying 1 - 5 of 331 entries.

Plus ça change

  • Posted on January 12, 2014 at 9:23 am

A young man is standing at night on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. The scent of orange blossoms hangs in the warm Easter air. A growing warmth is also drawing him to a young woman who seems to like him. Over breakfast of pitta bread with strawberry jam, grape juice and Turkish coffee she likes his eyes, his sense of integrity, his humour and sense of where he is going.

A middle-aged woman is remembering her graduation year, the daring to go to Israel to see the archaeology and history just weeks before finals while everyone else was sweating their revision. She is remembering the morning muezzin after an evening of romantic feelings, and how her eyes had been so attractive to someone else.

A young man is descending a Peak District hill on a hot summer day. He has been struggling with something and walking is therapeutic. His rucksack contains the day’s essentials to protect him against change in weather and he is churning over thoughts as poetic lines and songs in his head. His boots strike the gritstone rocks as he negotiates the bracken hillside. The map in his pack is also in his head as he heads for the road that leads to toasted teacakes. This has all been familiar territory for some time.

A middle-aged woman in stout boots, jeans, rucksack and warm jumper has just left the crag-climbers behind as she follows the track through bracken and down to a grassy path and a familiar church. You can always follow the steeples as you come off the moor; this she learned when quite young, and first came to the Peak District by bus. A very old map is in her rucksack, the folds now open tears, but it is a reminder and a prompt if she fancies a new track or diversion. She’s come further than she had imagined to be here now. The valley will welcome her with a cosy tea shop, where she will distil some thoughts in her poetry notebook.

It is a daring moment for the father of two, as he begins work on a new house together. His plumbing skills will be called for, and some re-wiring, and he doesn’t yet realise, but the tiling job will turn into his first plastering job, and he will do it well to make a perfect little family bathroom. Before he leaves he will have renovated the kitchen, rebuilt doorways, installed full-length sliding wardrobe doors and interior and redecorated throughout. He will be cared for through back surgery, and he will also be found out for what he really is.

A 57-year old woman is detaching the soil pipe from a lavatory pan and clearing the bathroom in her flat for some renovation. By the time she finishes, the room will be quite different, with neatly boxed pipes and tiled surfaces, new flooring and attractive lilac walls. Here she will take her showers in a morning, and hot baths to candles and music at weekends. Other jobs will get sorted over time. About to be divorced, she is getting used to living alone and doing everything for herself. Soon she will be getting an appointment for surgery, and is wondering what it will be like, dealing with pain and recovery, alone.

A middle-aged man is lying on a gurney, a line in his arm and a pain in his back. If he is to walk normally again, parts of his body will be removed, the place closed, and he will recover. If the surgeon does his job well, the pain will be gone and he will stand on his toes again. His pain has evoked sympathy, support and loving care, and he has learnt a lot about pain, the mind, sense of value to others, and vulnerability. He has been scared, disturbed by a body that isn’t right, and prepared himself for this moment. Later, his eyes open in a disoriented state. It is over. Any pain is different. It will diminish in coming days, and life will return to normal.

A later-middle-aged woman is lying on a gurney, a line in her arm, and a yearning in her heart. Soon her eyes will close, and if the surgeon does his job well, her pain will be gone and she will dream of returning to dance, but in clothes that fit properly, and without having to disguise anything. She knows plenty of people who have come this way before her, and is reassured. But she will not be returning home to the love and care of a family. She has learned a lot about truth and authenticity, and about the conditionality of love. In a few hours, her eyes will open in a disoriented state of euphoria, and she will experience considerable pain before she begins to heal. But for the first time, she will feel really, fully, whole.

She may also lie there in the coming days and catch the scent of orange blossom in a shower gel or bar of soap. She may imagine the smell of strong coffee or ask for strawberry jam. Visitors may see a new light in her eyes, or recognise a strong integrity and a sense of arrival in someone who knows where they’re going. Her humour will break through as usual, unchanged. There may be a mixture of tears, from pain, from joy, and from the memory of a romance that started in Jerusalem and lasted over 30 years, and that depended entirely on that young man who woke with the muezzin. And that was conditional on her not being here, now, like this.

This is the story of a single person, in short episodes. Anyone really knowing this person may well say ‘plus ça change’. There may seem to be external changes, and indeed there are. But there is no pretence, and a lifetime of being one and the same person has finally come together. Very little can be considered ‘lost’ about this person. Her life has changed, and inside the difference is incomprehensibly better. But you will always know who she is.

But I don’t actually want this story to be about me. I want it to be a perspective for people starting out in the realisation that they have gender dysphoria, and for anyone who knows, loves and cares for them. I want also to show how being transsexual is a perfectly normal difference to be born with, and that avoiding the awareness and the issues is cruel and unnecessary. If this was the familiar story, rather than the sensational documentary about ‘sex swaps’, then we might all have grown up with acceptance. I have had to learn to be open and confident. To begin with it was daunting and I felt very vulnerable. That was after a lifetime of fear of being found out as something bad. I already knew it was bad to be thinking about my gender as different, and the parallels above illustrate how wrong and unnecessary the split life has been. I am not a different person, and if I have changed in some ways, it is only for the better. But most of me by far is the same, including the eyes.

This week I was asked if I was one of those men who likes to dance in a skirt. The misunderstanding was mine. As it transpired, the only reason I was asked was my name (more commonly sounding like a man’s name) and because in the dance I do, there is a background principle that allows wearing clothes that broaden your shared experience of being simply human rather than gendered. It was perfectly reasonable to guess, but it was not because of how I look. This, I didn’t mind, and it afforded to opportunity to explain openly what it means to be transsexual to someone who genuinely wanted to understand. I hope I shall always be prepared to sit down like this and explain. If I, and people like me don’t, the world will be full of men in the story above, who are too afraid to be who they really are (the woman in all the episodes above), and families and colleagues uncertain about being associated with us, and journalists who think that we are freaks and perverts and bad for society.

Plus ça change? I think so, despite my journey over the last few years. We all change over the course of our lives, and mine may seem like greater changes, but never ever think of people like me as becoming anything other than who we really are. Some things change when someone ‘transitions’, but many more do not.

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#biologicaltrans

  • Posted on April 6, 2022 at 8:17 pm

If there is one thing that gender-critical or anti-trans people do not understand, it is biology.

If there is one thing that they and the anti-woke culture-warriors need, it is what they fight against. Race, colonialism, patriarchy.

Without these, all the above have no cause, and yet simultaneously they do not understand them at all.

Nothing grates more – daily in current times – than journalists, politicians, social media opinionates, sounding off about ‘biological males’ and ‘biological females’. These terms are repeated without critical thought, on the assumption that of course we all know they represent a self-evident truth. Search ‘biology’ in the search bar of this blog and you can read a few reasons why that is not the case, with links elsewhere too. Yes, there are two overlapping Gaussian distributions for a number of sex traits in biology – and there is not one trait but many. Even chromosomes, hormones, gene expression, organ sizes and so on are not strictly binary. Personality and sense of identity follow a similar pattern. For any particular trait it might look like this, with a greater or lesser overlap:

graph of overlapping Gaussian distribution of sex traits

All of these are biological traits.

Observation or examination?

Yes, we look at people in the street and by and large we form quick opinions (not always) of a person’s gender. Yes, gender – not sex. Because we are looking at shapes, faces, clothes, presentation – in other words, outward appearance. When we talk about sex assigned at birth, we look at outward appearance of the baby’s body, and at birth this relates mainly to penis size. 1 in 200 live births present ambiguity, so what seems like clear observation of a single sex trait is not as clear as most would believe.

So, given the complexity of a number of sex traits that land individual humans near the middle of each of those overlapping Gaussian distributions, describing sex as a patently obvious binary is problematic to say the least. What about examination? We know for certain from our street observation, that further examination, like actually asking the person – not undressing them, please – would prove us wrong in a fair few cases. And why do we want to examine each other in this way, unless of course to disrespect them? Should we all have to carry gender certificates, so that the butch dyke in the women’s loos doesn’ have to strip off as proof when challenged?

A lot of us humans fall into the two broad sex categories and are happy to recognise clear opposites. Quite a lot fall in love with another from the other category and many of these thus reproduce. Many do not either reproduce – some because biologically they cannot – or do not fall in love with opposites. These days we are enlightened enough in most countries (though far from all) to accept that sexuality is innate. In other words, we accept there is some biology of sexuality that we cannot change.

What is biology?

Some gender critical folk like dictionary definitions (goodness knows why, since language is so fickle) with ‘woman: adult human female’ (seriously? without then defining adult, human and female in non-circular ways?). So what about biological male / female? Biology is just the study of living things. If you study sex traits there is no way you easily come out with simple things like ‘biological male’. I mean, does that term embrace other traits like sexuality and fertility, like personality and presentation, like sense of self and identity – and if not why not? Which bit of any of us is not, ultimately, biologically defined?

In the spirit of hashtags, I wish to tag myself as #biologicaltrans since that has no more or less meaning than those other hashtags. I am a living thing, and the traits I have regarding my body, my mind, my sexuality, my prenatal development, as well as my chromosomes (whatever they tell, because I have never had them tested) are contained within this organism that I call ‘me’. That and nothing else. I am not trans by socialisation, by choice, by persuasion or by behaviour. Therefore I am #biologicaltrans.

I very seriously propose that we all start using the terms: biological cis, biological trans, biological non-binary, if only to dissolve the ignorance of biological male / female and stop it being weaponised as something ‘don’t-you-dare-refute’ against trans and non-binary people.

I am also very well aware that much of this is not seriously about biology and variance at all – it’s about politics and power, distraction and ideology. But at least let’s point out the #biologicalstupid.

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Tell us another

  • Posted on January 24, 2022 at 9:17 pm

When I began this blog it felt really important to narrate the self-discovery I was experiencing, as I myself was discovering that I was far from alone, and equally finding the ways in which I was. It wasn’t about trans rights, it was just my story. And that meant some real separation. As humans, we are inherently good at dividing things up, and I have said before that the result can be that there is nothing so lonely as being human. Uniquely as a species, we have complex language, and can therefore create concepts and stories that we share and which take on great importance.

Whether we create religious narratives, philosophies, stories of preservation and survival, the bottom line is that life is finite and singular. I am an isolated being in the incalculable enormity of the universe. For some, the only life worth striving for is the next one. No-one else can inhabit our lives, be inside our minds, understand our thoughts, and no-one else can take responsibility for us. The most we can do is touch and share stories. Belonging becomes the need to be a character in a shared story.

A shared story is a bundle, and it can be like a bunch of flowers with a stalk of barbed wire. We can be careful, pick and choose the parts of the story we talk about or have to handle. Some of us scarcely belong in the stories. And yet our lives can instead be a long foraging for the flowers and leaves we like best, creating our own bouquet. And just sometimes we find another who holds out a similar self-selected bouquet, and we recognise something much more important than our sense of isolation.

Thanks a bunch

In my world, as I experience it, joining in fully feels like being handed the wrong bunches. Over here is a world of music, but with conflicts: at one time a drinking culture, at another very patriarchal, or again conflicting response to the climate emergency. Over there is a technical world with on the one hand fascination over possibilities, but on the other high consumerism, privilege or carelessness as to consequences. In writing I found a community, but also fellow writers who are gender critical, unable to cope with a very small number of people like me who seem to threaten their story of what it means to be a woman. How we need our stories in order to not feel alone! And so we create stories that keep others out, deceive ourselves, and end up feeling a lot less safe. Like Orwell’s 1984: so long as there is an enemy there is patriotism.

We divide ourselves in order to belong to groups we can feel are small enough to give us attention, and to whom we can relate. If we compete as groups we can have a sense of winning, being on top, being further ahead. And more than anything, we have disconnected ourselves from our ancestors, from our history and from our planet. We don’t belong to the planet any more, it’s too demanding, makes us too subservient and after all, we have subdued it as much as we can. It belongs to us. We are learning that this isn’t true, of course. A volcano, a procession of tornadoes, a tsunami, extreme weather, subsiding tundra, collapsing ice shelves quickly remind us how small and not in control we are. But just as quickly, we are no longer one species, we are tribes of masters of the universe. Nothing unites us as much as shattered human hubris, shared catastrophe isn’t far behind, but give us back our inequalities, and we are willingly split open.

I suspect billionaires don’t want a world of billionaires. Nor millionaires, similarly. But I bet there are very many people lucky enough to have £10,000 in the bank who would feel a whole lot better knowing that everyone had less than £100,000 and more than £10,000. Inequality is deeply corrosive, and it breeds a sense of being deserving and therefore deserving ever more. So what is the equality that we want? Is it levelling up? Levelling down? Evening out? There is no deserving.

We are all the product of fortune: what else makes a person entrepreneurial, super intelligent, excellent with their hands, a prodigy musician, bipolar, Aspergic, Downs, courageous, anxious … able to cope with their social upbringing, thrown into damaging subcultures or criminality? Not one of us can pull ourselves up by our own boot-laces. Does it make anyone more deserving if they steal someone else’s boots so they run slower? Did they create that propensity in themselves?

Friction from fiction

Do the gender critical among us want a world divided sharply and absolutely between ‘biological men’ and ‘biological women’? I feel that nobody needs patriarchy quite as much as the gender critical. They will say that gender is a social construct (a fancy way of saying ‘made up story’). But what is there in our heads, in our society, in our culture, in all our knowledge and science and history that is not a story, a fiction? When we make our divisive stories up, we’re looking for protection in numbers, a community to feel more safe in than out, and therefore creating strangers and outcasts. And so we create rights. Rights for ourselves, rights for those we include, that are not afforded to anyone else. Rights are given by those with power to do so, handed out perhaps with true humanity, but usually giving a little from those who have rather more. Because we choose to divide ourselves.

There is but one human species. There have been more, and perhaps Denisovans, Neanderthals and Sapiens all got along pretty fine at one time. Then language, then stories and ideologies. It was probably differential abilities to deal with climate change (over a much longer period than presents itself to us now) that filtered us out, and here we are with stories about race being a species thing, when it isn’t, and calling some cultures superior and more deserving than others. Patriarchy is rooted in stories of superior physical or intellectual strength and has no more grounds to it than hypothesised races. Everything we think about ourselves, our roles, origins, interactions and grouping, is fiction, made by ourselves to group and divide.

Writing our own

Being trans or non-binary is therefore a very subversive thing. We don’t create ourselves as a story in order to have somewhere to belong, and indeed we have many different stories. But by and large we have one thought in common: we know what we are not. The stories we have been told about ourselves are not true, and in order to live authentic lives, we have to live a different story. Sometimes we hold these bouquets out to each other, and recognise that they are different from the rest of the world. We chose not to have the strands of barbed wire in what we were handed, but to forage our own.

Are we asking for rights? From whom? Who, in our stories, are the rights holders to beg from? Why do some think trans rights limits their rights?

Are we asking for equality? To be treated the same as who, brought in as a special case into someone else’s story?

Or are we looking for justice, not just for ourselves but everyone? That gives us a lot to undo.

 

* The title Tell us another may be a Yorkshire expression, meaning ‘I don’t believe your story!’

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What it means

  • Posted on November 10, 2021 at 9:01 pm

This is what it means to be trans
to get up – in the morning, get dressed and
(face the world)
This is what it means to be trans
to face the world – take the car to work
(and drive)
This is what it means to be trans
to drive – and when asked for whatever reason
(show your licence)
This is what it means to be trans
to show your licence, know it represents you
(without questions)
This is what it means to be trans
to face questions – when being yourself always
(means different)
This is what it means to be trans
to be different – yet confident, ready to explain
(but avoiding)
This is what it means to be trans
to avoid – your history, leave yourself behind
(sometimes to lie)
This is what it means to be trans
to lie – with someone you love, find comfort
(and it doesn’t matter)
This is what it means to be trans
it doesn’t matter – when you’re trusted, only when
(you aren’t)
This is what it means to be trans
you aren’t – safe online, in theory or ideology
(because sex)
This is what it means to be trans
because sex – is a word and gender isn’t to some
(you’re unreal)
This is what it means to be trans
when you un-reel, unwind, lose yourself, dare
(simply to love)
This is what it means to be trans
to love – simply, uncomplicated without script
(or licence)
This is what it means to be trans
to be licensed – to be driven and to face the world
(with permissions)
This is what it means to be trans
to be permitted – to be conditional, debated, clothed
(in everyone’s fears)
This is what it means to be trans
to face those fears – go home, take off your clothes
(and address the night)

2021©Andie Davidson

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Why it is never over

  • Posted on July 9, 2021 at 7:22 pm

Today is one of those days, the sort you are reminded of, which you would have been reminded of, but for which there is no need. It’s a mark on the calendar. On our calendar it is one of many births, marriages and deaths. This one is a birthday: my daughter is 30 today. I haven’t seen her for ten years now, so we have never known each other as adults. In those years many people have said ‘you never know, she might one day …’. But I don’t think so. Not now.

This isn’t public grieving, or looking for sympathy, just a note of what happens and how you keep finding that something is gone. I saw my marriage going down against all hope as I moved into transition. It wasn’t my decision and perhaps I was naïve to think that love could overcome becoming real. But this I didn’t see, and never had any meaningful conversation to engage with her over what was a deeper divorce. I am not alone, however many good stories I read of families that survive and thrive one member’s transition. I often wished that could have been mine.

So that was then and nothing has changed. But it also means I can’t talk to anyone about her, or ask after her and get any meaningful answers. I hope she is happy; I think she probably is. But hers is a life where I can never be supporting, listening, caring or doing and celebrating any of the things a normal parent does. I find it easier never to mention her because I have nothing to add, and people will always ask what happened, and if that means explaining about the problem of being trans, it adds more uncertainty about how much people know, understand, accept, or are kind.

It is never over.

I still think that her explanation about her father is either that he is dead or that he walked out. I guess I did, but that was because I could not hold myself together still loving someone after 30 years, who was daily moving away out of touch. And my daughter just made sure she was never there, not asking or finding out. You can’t persuade a trans person to ‘be both’, to be a little bit, even, of what they are not. We all needed to face it as it was and failed. And that is where the grief still lies, probably on all sides. And so I am either dead or a deserter, but anyway, happy birthday.

I find it very uncomfortable still, watching films and dramas in which the plot revolves around relationships breaking up in predictable ways, not out of badness, but out of the way the characters are framed. I see it coming and I am squirming: why did the writer make this happen? Why did they have to wreck lives, break families up, destroy loving well-meaning people who were doing their best?

One we have just been watching had a character trying to define love, so they would know when they found it. ‘You make me a better person’ was one way of knowing. So long as it doesn’t lead to dependence and conditionality. It is quite close to my skeptical definition ten years ago of ‘You make me the person I want to be.’ When that happens the other can’t grow, not even into what they could be, and you feel that the other is taking something away from you, if they do grow.

I have grown into more of what I should be, into more of what I am. I don’t know much about my family as was, but I would rather I could help them be better people than have to play dead. I am happy, absolutely and, I think, a better person who they will never know.

Families with trans members need support, and that was conspicuously missing for mine. I hope that one day my daughter will understand just enough to know it didn’t have to be like this.

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Ten Years After

  • Posted on April 10, 2021 at 8:21 pm

It is ten years ago this month since I plucked up the courage to seek active support. I looked up a local trans group that had a weekly drop-in afternoon, and basically had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I scarcely knew where I was in life, only that things were changing and I hadn’t a clue what next. I was unemployed and just made redundant, worried about jobs after the age of 50, a son at university and a daughter growing our of home. I was at the level of sinking feelings that I was understanding something true, but unwanted. It was a growing realisation that felt a bit like the cranking up of a rollercoaster. It felt controlled, but heading for something that felt like free-fall.

I went to the support group, and it felt weird. So I wasn’t alone, which was great, but here was a room full (yes, full) of people who were so diverse that it wasn’t exactly reassuring at first! Where did I fit? That in itself proved very important, because I wasn’t presented with the ‘right’ way of being.

What happened after that is the subject of the whole of this blog, and it took me a year in which to understand that I would be going alone, losing much of what I had held dear for 30 years. It took a further 2 years to complete the foundation of this journey, and now 7 years on from that, it’s a whole decade of my life later.

So, ten years after? What was I doing on the 2021 Trans Day of Visibility?

I wasn’t doing anything.

Well, despite Covid, I was working. And I forgot. Should I have let people know? ‘Hey, everyone! It’s been ten years!’

In some ways this has been a quiet year. The gender-critical feminists had their time over the Gender Recognition Certificate consultation, that was published, fudged by the Women and Equalities Minister, and returned to the public for further contribution. I replied (here, if you’re interested). And so it goes on.

Worldwide, the tide washes this way and that, and trans people are as vulnerable to prejudice, discrimination and loss of rights as ever. I said it took me 2 years to complete the foundation of my journey: by which I meant that from my first consultation at a gender clinic to completing surgery, it was that long. It felt like an absolute age for me. You know, when you can see the answer to a puzzle, and people are saying, nah! put it back in the box for later, when we can solve it together. For you there’s no need; right now will do fine. As it turns out I was incredibly lucky, because the system was soon after overwhelmed and under-resourced. Waiting times are currently ‘extremely long’ (NHS GIC, 2020) and first appointments are taking 3 years.

In the past 7 years I have simply resolved into being who and what I am. And it is a peaceful place, gender-wise. The only disruption is face-to-face with the gender-critical ‘feminists’ who might grudgingly allow me to be ‘a woman, sort of’. Which would be OK, if they didn’t also petition and lobby for my exclusion from normal life. The rest of the time I don’t talk about it, other than to honest friends and to those it helps. So why this page? Are you interested? You really don’t have to be, but if you are on the same kind of journey, or have doubts about being able to find your way through, I hope it helps.

Visibility? I don’t really know. If nobody else minds, I have nothing to add. Ask me honestly and I will explain. I will petition and stand up, support, comment freely, protest for trans rights, and you will not know, unless you’re on the wrong side of the argument. I am not sure I want to be more visible than that, not least because I shouldn’t have to be. I just don’t hide anything: trans, lesbian partner, I’m just there.

Ten Years After?

That reminds me. The rock group of the same name was active during my grammar school years and I do look back and reflect. My hair was longer then (even after these lockdown times), and my musical preferences haven’t changed. Working from home, I have often given myself a background of the music of the times, especially progressive rock. These are our most formative years, and I wish I had understood myself as trans at the time, instead of the confusions, complications, and disruptions of simply feeling out of kilter with myself. My life would have been completely different of course, and I would never have had what I subsequently lost. My family would never have had the distress of my change. But that’s how it is. The old music still tells me that you are what you are, and that, for all that does change, many of the essentials never do. I am different, yes, but in most things I am not.

So wherever you are in life, being trans is just a part of what you are, and you really can get through the surf, or the storms and just be yourself. People will kick up, or even kick at you, but it is quite possible to get on, be authentic, be strong. And live. It’s a crazy world, but you don’t have to be.

Update, 21 December 2021: Gender Recognition Service Urgently in Need of Reform say MPs

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