Charing Cross

  • Posted on December 15, 2012 at 12:08 am

For trans people living in the south (no, I said trans not trains!) the name Charing Cross carries a lot of emotion and feeling. I also remember it from the book 84 Charing Cross Road, but of course the place in question is in Hammersmith. And today, in the rain. A lot. You first learn of it as a place many (and some very well known) people have traipsed their years away to, and found resolution for their gender identity. Then you realise that it is part of West London Mental Health Trust, responding to gender dysphoria (or rather the physiological state of having a brain in one gender and a body in another) as a mental disorder. OK, since DSM V dropped the disorder bit, it isn’t that, but it is still in the mental health diagnostic manual, not in the physiological/hormonal disorders manual.

And so you are placed in the hands of psychiatrists. I saw my second psychiatrist today. When I see my third, for a Charing Cross second opinion, they will finally draw the conclusion that I am of perfectly sound (female) mind – and that the reason I have spent so much money, time and emotion (and pain), come to the edge of suicide (and backed away), lost pretty much all I hold dear, and live alone happier than I could have imagined, supporting myself in a full-time job where I have only ever presented as a woman – is because my body developed with male attributes while my brain didn’t.

Frustrating. People aren’t always as clear as I am, and some transition partially, retreat, reconsider, transition again, have doubts, cling onto things they feel more important, and maybe never decide to physically transition. But they do this after many years, not just after a short while. And so the conversation online today has gone over the value of what is called the ‘real life test’ or more accurately now, ‘real life experience’ (RLE). Basically it means you prove, through witnesses like employment, and people who can vouch for you, that you have lived exclusively in a gender not assigned at your birth, for two whole years.

Unsupported

And it is a dangerous frustration. For a mental health approach, insisting on persisting with the cause of all the distress, indeed placing it all under some unreasonable pressure and risk, hardly seems conducive to good mental health. Why? Because people like me seek out medications before they are available on prescription. Losing hair matters when you are older, and entering puberty matters when you are young. These things are irreversible. Nowadays, young people can have their puberty arrested. But no-one is going to give me anti-androgens while my hair recedes. But also because we have to go many months without seeing anyone at all, during which time we are given the task of unsupported RLE. I was asked today if I would like help with my voice. Of course I bloody would! ‘Sir’ on the phone is immensely hurtful, especially when you have to explain. And yet you can’t even get voice therapy until the third psychiatrist has approved your status as genuinely being the gender you are already living in, for one year.

OK; so you pay for your own laser, electrolysis, prosthetics, wigs, voice therapy, counselling, hormones (this is not a personal endorsement of the practice, just that so many feel compelled to) etc. and do your best, while your world is collapsing around you – and call it real life experience. I suppose if you get through that, you get through anything. But not everyone is as strong or resilient as I am, and I wonder how many ‘fail’, suffer or perhaps die along they way because it becomes too much. I am not alone in finding that I may well be able to obtain my Gender Recognition Certificate and change my birth certificate gender, before I can complete surgery to correct things.

I do understand that for some, being given time and space is important for self-understanding. Let’s not rush anything; maybe you aren’t completely sure, or able to be. But some of us really are. Waiting for treatment is wasted treatment time.

Is this the best way for the health professionals to make sure they aren’t sued for passing anyone for surgery who isn’t prepared to sign an indemnity instead? Yes, I would sign in blood that I would rather die as a woman within a year, than have to live ever again, and for however long, as a healthy man.

Why?

Real Life Experience

Real?

Could it be anything other than Life?

Is life ever either not real or not experienced?

Do we ever experience anything other than real life?

I have been tested. For around 40 years I did not know what was wrong, why I was an outsider among men, why I wanted what I hated myself for. That was real. Very real, and very uncomfortably real. At times it tore me apart inside, it was that real. And it was life, and it was my experience. Ultimately, I failed at ‘living as a man’.

For around 18 months I tried to live a dual gendered life. To hang onto the person I loved most in all the world, to a partnership I valued above anything else, to a shared life that was safe and mutually supportive. I tried. It was life, and it was my experience, and again, ultimately, I failed. That’s two tests, thoroughly lived and experienced that could have destroyed me. What else can I try? Supposing as a woman I fail again. What else could I be, without losing reality, losing life and therefore ending experience?

This is not Real Life Experience for me. This is what happens when all the tests are already done and over. I failed at all the other options, whereas this one has given me a sense of reality, of living, that I never knew I was allowed to experience. I know what I need to complete this picture, and that knowledge gets harder to live with, without resolution, each day. And yet, without any support, I must continue, waiting for appointments for opinions, for treatment, whilst doing my best to convince the world that I am not forever in a transition, but really what I say I am.

There is nothing else. That’s what makes me so … Charing Cross!

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It still works!

  • Posted on December 9, 2012 at 10:10 am

One phrase that will always be with me, and which characterises the family life I used to have, is ‘it still works!’ Coined by my son, it was frequently used in our home. When we thought some battered toy, item of furniture, even clothing, or appliance, was beyond it – no, it still worked. There was no need for a new one, no replacement. So what, that it looked well knocked-about and repaired many times? What this really meant was that the item was well-loved and familiar, and as such was never over-protected. Instead of being preserved, it had been well used.

Closer to my son ’s heart than mine, this week I heard that three Pacific-class steam locomotives in the speed-record ‘Mallard’ family were coming back to the UK from the USA for restoration. Then, that some 60 Spitfire aircraft are to be recovered in the Philippines, where they have lain buried in crates since the second world war. Yes; they still work. Or they shall do, once fixed up.

Yesterday I was sitting thinking in more poetic mood, about museums. Brightly-painted machines that used to work: not just function, but do work. Some even seem to still work, driven several times a day perhaps by compressed air in place of steam, no longer attached to gears, or belt and pulleys and things that cut, beat, polished, drilled, pumped, lifted or moved. They used to be somewhere, in the sense of really being, not just turning over. In the days they were used for purpose, they were polished and oiled, cared for, but pushed to limits. If parts wore out, if paint flaked, if oil gunked up, they were repaired. This engine has a cracked boiler? A gasket has blown? A bearing has gone? It still works. It just needs one of these or one of those.

And costume exhibitions in museums. Do you ever wonder who was the last person to wear that dress, petticoat, hat, shoes? Which lasted longer, the person or the vestment? Was it laundered and put away, to be found later, or retrieved, as it were, from the laundry basket, as last worn? And then you notice the tears and repairs. The lace with overlays, replacement not-quite-matching design, seams taken in or let out, shoes with multiple leather patches. And you recognise the value of clothing, loved and useful items that still worked, that were worth not replacing.

And yet we also know the feeling when we learn that some monstrosity of a building achieves listed status! OK, so it was an example of architecture of its era, maybe the first, or paradigmatic, but why?! It never worked well, it was a bad design, a bad concept and it was awful building construction. A reminder? Surely not because ‘it still works’.

Everything has its day. Even Mallard, even the Spitfire, the petticoat and bustle, the concept-built block of concrete flats, the button-boots. Maybe it would still work, but no-one wants it to. Not any more. We might want to show it still could, but it will last longer in the memory to be in a museum. And we want it to. We also recognise the slippers that have been comfortable so long, the favourite bra that just fitted better than the rest, the coat with the cuffs that are telling you respectability matters as much as warmth.

And so it is that what still works is a function of familiarity and commitment, with fitness for purpose. A well-loved bear, behind glass, is still a sadness, whereas whalebone stays are a relief. The analogy I am struggling with is, of course, obvious. Am I digging up, preserving, restoring, replacing or placing behind glass – or indeed archiving out of sight – the most precious things about which I was still saying: ‘it still works!’? Right now, there is the wonder of the well-oiled machine, the grace of the Spitfire, the familiar comfort of the petticoat, the familiar skyline – and the sadness in the bear. But I am feeling some relief about the whalebone and realising some things just didn’t ever fit. It relates to me, it relates to my marriage, my one big love affair.

All these other things have been replaced by something that works, and works better. I am hoping the same is true about love and partnership.

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Order, disorder, out of order

  • Posted on December 7, 2012 at 11:41 pm

Order and disorder are at the heart of gender perception. Putting things in order, arranging them in a logical or predictable way, means tidiness and ease of retrieval. Something is there when you want to find it, and when you are looking in the right place you don’t find something unexpected instead.

Order

Order is the way we don’t lose things. But if ever you have worked with databases (and I suppose if you haven’t, even a book with an index is a database) you come to realise that a table of contents isn’t enough. Order is complex, and most real-life databases are relational: in other words there are different kinds of relationships involved in their ordering, because there are different reasons for finding the same thing, and sometimes several things possibly meet the initial requirement. These relationships are: one-to-one – my cat is Suki, Suki is my cat. One-to-many – my Suki is a black cat, not all black cats are my Suki. Many-to-many – there are lots of cats called Tiddles, of all colours. Being too simple can be complicated: where shall I keep this key? With all keys in a key drawer? Or in a jar near where it is used? Or in my pocket because then it is always where it is needed? Or in the door, because security isn’t an issue and it saves time? What I want is for the key to be in all places (associated with keys in general, associated with the particular door, on my person in case I am outside), and that is why there are so many ‘see also’s in book indexes.

We are often very simplistic in ordering people too, according to our own need. This is the reason for racial segregation, for sex discrimination, why we stick to a particular religion, and why we have nationalist terrorists. It’s all about simple right order. Oh, and it’s why we name disorders, so they too become ordered. We love order, we need order, and we do so hate order to change – it is so disorienting.

Even I like order, and prefer it to disorder, but it does mean putting me in the ‘wrong’ place, compared with where I used to be, and that confuses. Where is that key? I’ve always kept it in the jar, and it’s not there! And yet when you find it, it is the right key, it is the same key. Someone may have borrowed it, put a useful coloured tab or keyring on it, it may have got rusty, but it still works. Where it is, how it is described or tagged, matters a whole lot less than what it is. It just helped you feel sure where to find it in the simplest possible way.

Unless you order your keys by coloured tabs, rather than the doors they open, that is. And I do so hate yellow tabs, they don’t go with anything I wear.

Disorder

I have a disorder, it seems. Officially it used to be called gender identity disorder, now gender dysphoria. But it has to be a disorder so that an orderly diagnosis can be written down, and so that in many parts of the world, insurance funding for the right medical support can be given. It must be one of the few disorders that is diagnosed as psychological and put in order solely by physiological intervention. So we cannot even properly locate the disorder.

My disorder means that my 56-year history of being here was described in some respects in the wrong way. I have always been dropped in the male jar, with male keys, and now I live in a prettier box, some people mislay me. It might be a pronoun mistake, it might be a deliberate misuse of the name I used to have, and which is legally no longer mine. Or it might be that I am staring them in the face but, because I am in the wrong order, they cannot see me – or that I am in a place they would rather not look because of what they think I am associated with! Order is actually as much what we are accustomed to and like, as what is right or best. Don’t we all keep something in a quite illogical place but never lose it? I don’t really have a disorder at all. In fact I am very ordered; I just place myself in order (the best I can find) according to my preference, not yours.

And this is why people who are differently-gendered generally do not like the term ‘disorder’.

Loss of order

The worst thing that can happen in the orderedness of a relational database (where one tag can belong to many things) is not that a tag gets lost, but that it gets confused with another and things become insufficiently distinguished and separable. How do you know, if you start retagging and reclassifying from scratch, that you are putting the order back the way it was? I am not about to say that order does not matter, only that our gender tags are in many-to-many relations, and that ideas of gender order and disorder are not as simple as we have come to like. But we are so afraid of losing that unique tag, and the whole thing falling apart! It is a very conditioning fear too.

We are all in a conditioned place, where I am incredibly comfortable with myself in a way I never was, but where things are a bit awkward when people think I am still disordered (see De Facto, Defect or Defector). And because others are conditioned too, it does not matter to some that the key still fits the lock. The tag is the wrong colour. And the consequence of that is that I am not in the jar any more, and if I am in the pretty box, it is better not to use me.

Official order out of order

This month has seen more furore over the American Psychiatric Associations’s ‘bible’, the revised fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Love of, and some necessity of, order has led to a limited amount of reorganisation of gender identity disorder (GID) into gender dysphoria, and removing it from the section on sexual disorders. But imagine you are born with a dysfunctional limb and you are defined and diagnosed as having a psycho-appendicular disorder? And instead of being sent to a bone specialist you are sent to a psychiatrist? That’s what my sense of gender is like: I do not have a mental disorder. I have a problem with the way my body developed.

Next week I visit a gender identity clinic for the first time. It has taken an inordinately long time to get to this first appointment, and my body has been changing nicely in the meantime, and I have retreated a long way from the edge of the big black inviting pit my mind was sometimes dragged towards. I am OK now, thank you, and I like the way my body is responding. I am very ordered. The clinic? Part of a Mental Health trust. My appointment? With a psychiatrist.

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Familiar

  • Posted on December 5, 2012 at 11:39 pm

You have become my most familiar stranger,
and stranger still my most familiar friend.

Except that we may not speak without memory,
nor remember without speaking exception.

You look my way—ask after me—as if it mattered,
matted strands of friendship, lying, unexamined.

 

Do not touch me—that’s near enough to be—
or to be not, lest touching reminds, feels strange.

Disassemble me again with un-love, lay me out,
in all my parts for choosing not to reassemble me.

I don’t know what you have become, except
you remind me of a time I knew a stranger.

 

It seems stranger to see just part, excluded now,
excepted from friendship, not quite stranger enough.

Friendship, as progressive, is slipping backwards,
into a time before even the way I thought, was new.

Before the way I loved was lovely, coming as it did
from everything I am, before you knew the way I am.

 

In becoming familiar to myself, unfamiliar to you
you have become my most familiar, absent, friend.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

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Birds of a feather

  • Posted on December 1, 2012 at 6:28 pm

I was very encouraged by the response to last week’s blog about the hope there is for finding what love really is all about, and finding that the foundations are in loving yourself rather than in what the other makes you. Maybe one day I shall find the same. Will positive thinking help? Someone on Facebook posted a link to a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, reviewed in the Guardian a couple of years ago, debunking the power of positive thinking. Does it make things better? Apparently not. And I shall be reminded, possibly chided, by my son who I was exhorting to think positively this week. I did. He doesn’t; but the outcome does look promising.

Personally, I don’t think the positive thinking does any more than I think prayer works, because what matters and makes a difference to me is the willingness to see opportunities to make progress in the direction you want. Positive thought, prayer, meditation are all ways of keeping your eyes open. I imagine it as being in dense jungle, having little sense of direction. You can give up; you may as well close your eyes or blunder about without a clue, going in circles. But if you keep alert, open, then every breath of wind that parts the leaves and reveals the direction of the sun, or the scent of water, or a warning of tigers, is just one little chance more of finding your way safely. You don’t make the difference, you are simply available to it. Right now I am trying to be available rather than closing my eyes. I have this idea, a reassuring idea, that somewhere, someone needs my love and wants to offer their own. Not in exchange, but because it will be the only thing we can do when we find it.

I am reminded to wait until I am ready – until the wind parts the leaves. Only two months ago I asked, for the last time: ‘Is this really the best we can do, after 32 years?’ It seems it was, and it felt very like negative thinking. The power of negative thinking is in closing your eyes, in not seeing possibilities.

Like Birds

And so it is that I came to reflect how so many of my girl friends at the moment are all emerging from lost partnerships, broken romances, or struggling with love/not-love and feeling like – well, like birds with broken wings. And we gather in mutual comfort, have our bit of fun, a night out, or a cry together, and reassure each other. And I sort of know that when any of us finds that love again we may fly off, with the joy we had when last we were loved and wanted.

It isn’t a negative existence though; we joke about the disastrous judgements we have all made, how we misunderstood and were misunderstood, and how dreadfully hard it is to find the ‘right’ partner. The trouble is, the more we establish the selves we settle into, the harder it is to imagine another fitting neatly in the way we need. Remember those compromises when we were teenagers or in our twenties? Yes, we would give up this or that, do something we might not otherwise, all in the cause of securing love, stability, coupledom. How much did we hide, and lose of ourselves, to be safe? Yes, we all did.

Perhaps we will learn that being single birds keeps us together in ways that are just as rewarding. But we all reflect that the comfort of partnership, of knowing there is always one who will love, support and look after you, remains a big gap. I love my broken-winged birds-of-a-feather, I really do. And girls’ nights out are something I have missed out on all my life until now, and it reminds me of how lonely I used to be sometimes, even before I lost my best friend and lifelong partner. So yes, I am thinking positively. Not because it will mend my wing, but so I can keep catching the hints of which direction to head in, and while I do, I have some lovely friends to stay chirpy with. And either my wing will mend, or I shall just have strong legs.

I have been fiddling with a poem on this too. I expect it will get better, but for now it’s like this: Like birds.

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