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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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A love less ordinary: Laura Newman

  • Posted on November 24, 2012 at 10:58 pm

This weekA Love Less Ordinary; Laura Newman I turned up a scanned article someone helpfully sent me ages ago. It was about Helen Boyd and Betty in the early days. Great! There was Betty doing Helen’s make-up, and then Betty resting her head lovingly on Helen’s shoulder. This was a love less ordinary, surely?

I was desperate, when I began to realise that my big unknown was gender dysphoria, to read, to buy books, to share the coming-to-understand. Desperate to show it wasn’t just me, in the hope that understanding would preserve the love in my partnership. I bought, as so many, My Husband Betty by Helen Boyd. We read it. It’s a great book.

The article has a pull-quote that says if Betty were ever to head for physical transition, their marriage would be over.

A trans friend asked if I had read the second book, She’s not the Man I Married. I wasn’t sure about doing that. It is in some ways the book of doubts. It’s the story of the uncertainty and impending change, it’s about love, identity and sexuality. One chapter is titled ‘Genitals are the least of it’. Phew! Could that be true? But it is about the period during which Betty had yet to commit to surgical reassignment (or correction). And the book ends still with all the fuzziness of not really knowing all that marriage and a trans partner implies, and whether Helen would still be the same Helen if Betty were ‘really’ to be just Betty. It was not a reassuring book to share, honest as it was.

Here was Helen full of doubts but full of love, accepting that her charming man she fell in love with was just an illusion.

My friend then said: ‘You know Betty has transitioned now?’ And if I remember rightly, I later read that Helen’s subsequent sentiment that has kept them together and campaigning, is that she just wanted still to be waking up with the person she has always loved most. But that isn’t in the book.

How many times did I say, usually in tears and fear: ‘You can walk away from this. I can’t!’? Hoping that the answer would be ‘I could never do that!’

There isn’t a third book, and we worked our way through personal stories, case studies of diverse lives, academic research. In fact most of the serious stuff you could get. It is all shot through with love, in the end, being the least of it, and why: that staying with a trans person erodes your own personality, identity, sexual certainty. That love is not – cannot be – enough.

There was nothing to say: ‘Hold on, this can work out. If this person [my trans partner] can go through so much, face such change, so much fear and pain, and retain self-identity, dignity and sense of self, stronger than ever – then maybe I can too.’

The new book: A Love Les Ordinary

Laura Newman’s book A Love Les Ordinary: sharing life, laughter and handbags with my transgender partner heads straight for this corner. It isn’t just the challenge of having – being known to have – a trans partner, it is that you can lose yourself in all the pressures and expectations of life anyway, and it is often the trans partner who shows the greatest honesty, strength and courage to be true to self. What if we were all able to do that? What if the issues aren’t about the trans partner, but about knowing that you are free to live life the way you should be, not just playing roles and meeting expectations? What makes a wonderful relationship? The sex you always thought correct? The ‘orientation’ you feel most fitting or comfortable with? No. It is one in which you know and love yourself with such honesty that you can be all you are with another who can do the same, regardless. Because then there is no compromise, no sell-out, no resentment that the other is preventing you being all you are. It doesn’t mean no give and take, it just means you both know it’s there and have agreed it freely. And it doesn’t mean no change, but that you can accept it together.

Maybe this harks back to something I wrote a long while back about other people not actually changing you, about honesty, and about how loving a person who never really was the ‘opposite’ but now shows it, doesn’t suddenly make you gay or lesbian.

The core of this understanding of love is that you cannot love another unless you love yourself, but that when you do, love matters more than any expectations.

You may have been told that already, through: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (which is only a minimum requirement – you can end up hating yourself and therefore your neighbour!), or through the Buddhist tenet of lovingkindness needing you to love yourself first. But Laura demonstrates how this works out in a good relationship, how it makes a great relationship, and why being fully, honestly yourself is therefore a prerequisite.

There is surprise when I explain to others that, given the choice to have my lover and my family and my home back, with 40 more healthy years of life ahead, in exchange for living as a man – or to be the woman I am on medications that could endanger my life, and alone – that the latter is the only thing I could ever do. I can only love from who I am, loving myself as I am.

Laura’s book is not for trans people. It is mainly for women facing unconventional relationships, and the quandry of loving someone others would not respect you for. What does it do to you, and why does it do anything to you at all? Laura does address sexuality, but again, if you loosen your understanding of gender, perhaps you can just as easily adjust your understanding of what it means to love someone who looks more like you.

This book is not about accepting trans people or any special dispensation, it is about how two people can make a wonderful loving partnership through knowing themselves equally, so that they can give love unconditionally. There are amazing possibilities here, for any love relationship, and Laura’s earlier experience with an insecure transvestite left a significant foundation for starting a very different relationship. Helen Boyd also knew she was dating a cross-dresser from the start. I shall shortly review Emma Canton’s If You Really Loved Me properly too, so all three books of successful survival were neither taken by surprise after a long and happy marriage, nor unrelentingly heterosexual.

A Love Les Ordinary is a really valuable addition to the reading list for partners who have to come to terms with what it means to love someone who is transgendered. It does not go so far as to address the implications of a partner who is transsexual, but even there it is a good start. And it should be thrust into the hands of anyone who says they cannot understand how you could actually love, let alone be intimate with, someone transgendered.

I am still waiting for the book that says how a spouse can unconditionally love a partner who comes to terms with their gender rather late on, without losing their own sense of self. It is probably something to do with the realisation that they have happily loved a person not knowing that so much of what they appreciated came from something they would never have chosen. But I do know of a small number of marriages that have continued on the basis of ‘they are still the same person (not “man”) I married’.

When it is written, I hope still to be around to review it, because it would be such useful reading. Meanwhile, I am just longing for a love less ordinary.

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