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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!’

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

Orientation: Portrait

  • Posted on June 7, 2019 at 8:42 pm

I’m sitting in front of the big portrait mirror, watching the incremental improvement in my hair under the expert scissors of my lesbian hairdresser. I can talk comfortably about my partner – and hers – and indeed about being trans. I told her early on, half presuming it was already obvious from my thin hair on top, my characteristic hairline, and to signal that I was OK to be identified. I started coming here on recommendation of my partner, so ‘coming out’ as gay had already been done by proxy, though it was into my first cut that I realised…

Trans is not a word to understand

  • Posted on September 14, 2018 at 11:28 pm

I think some people try to understand what it is to be transgender by trying to understand the words. If they can construct an argument about the words, their origins and use, they have grasped how real, people like me are.

Surely, I would be happy to have made no changes to my body or life if only this social construct of gender did not exist. Yes! I could have lived happily with a male body, dressed as I wished, shaved, gone bald with age and maintained all that cut and thrust of testosterone – because no-one would have minded. I could have just ‘been myself’!

Not so, dear reader, not so.

I am not a term to be understood. Etymology and use do not come near expressing what it is to be trans. Like old shoes, words get baggy with much use and don’t fit anymore.

I was not ‘born in the wrong body’ at all, any more than someone with red hair who hates it, or someone with a disability, or someone who has simply grown too tall from hormone problems. It is not the wrong body. I am what I am. It is just that brain and body development got a bit out of kilter somewhere early on. I can’t change my innate sense of self, but I can change my body.

What about you? Are you definitely a woman, or definitely a man? Are you sure? Or is your first question prefixed by ‘physically’, or ‘biologically’? If you do, you need to read up on the many aspects of what define ‘biological’ sex. Big time.

Or do you just know? I don’t think you need a mirror in the morning, or to have a feel around just to be sure. I don’t think you need a second opinion, and if it differed or was doubtful, I don’t think you might change your mind. When did you last dig out your birth certificate just to check out that your opinion of yourself matches that of the doctor or midwife?

Even if you live a non-binary life and dislike the idea of actually ‘being’ non-binary … you know what you are not.

Do you understand what it is to know if you are male, female or neither or a bit of both?

  • Seven years ago I began to understand.
  • Six years ago I began to live in a new way.
  • Five years ago I lived alone.
  • Four years ago I had transforming surgery.
  • Someone told me: ‘this is just the beginning’
  • Three years ago I began living with someone I deeply love.
  • And since then I have understood that for all the beginnings and endings, some will never understand.

I have been told that I am not a woman. I have been told that I am a man. I have been told that I am trans, or deluded, and many other things. I have been told that I am not lesbian, that I must be gay, or that I am still a hetero man because I used to be married while registered as a man.

I have been told many times what I am, what I am not, and effectively what I am not allowed to be.

What do you think? And where did you get your ideas from?

When my children were much younger, they had a friend who was the most tomboy a child I have ever known. A little later, my son had a trans friend at school. That was it. No issue or problem. Unlike me (yeah, well!), they had gay and lesbian kids in their school, and that’s just how they were. Friends I had at university were gay, lesbian and bi. I came to know people with intersex conditions. I discovered that there are men born with micro-penis, women born without a uterus. A colleague had a hysterectomy at a very young age, and so could never experience what most women share. And friends with polycystic ovaries and hormonal imbalances. More and more women who divorce men and begin lesbian relationships.

I wonder what their many life experiences have each been like. Could I segregate them by their life experience confidently and exclusively as women and men? If I DNA tested them and mapped their chromosomes, would that help? What about their sexual attractions (or lack of)? Would that help me divide them into straight, bi, gay and lesbian? I wonder how clearly I could research and gather physical, psychological, social and mental attributes in such a way as to divide them up?

But why?

Surely their needs are different. Medically? Socially? Surely a trans person is not as really the gender they claim, as someone born with unquestionably clear genitals and chromosomes and sexuality? I mean, it is so confusing that someone born with enough of a penis but XXY, who used to appear straight male, lives as female and has a female partner and calls themselves lesbian. I mean, surgery doesn’t really change your sex does it?

You say it is only confusing because we squish people into socially constructed boxes. If only the boxes didn’t exist, we would all be happy; no conflict of definitions. Well, I place myself in society where I feel I belong. Why do you want to place me where you think I belong?

I find this kind of narrative about sex, sexuality and gender no different from nationalism. Once upon a time there was a golden age, where everyone lived and worked happily together, the sun shone equally on all, there was a roof over everyone’s head and bread on the table. Wars did not happen, no-one was cheated or downtrodden; a benevolent king was on the throne and life was … good. That must have been before others came in, invaded and spoiled it all, with different languages, different ideas.

Was there not also a time when men were men, women were women and we all knew our place? Well that wasn’t so good for women, was it? So now we have feminism, we must protect at all costs what it means to ‘be a woman’. And that’s where the parallel golden age of gender breaks down. It was never good. The patriarchy still rules, just as first nations people all over the world constantly face erasure and victors rule the historical narrative.

Keeping transgender people out protects nothing, and only ingrains trans resentment against the gender nationalists, even those who define ‘woman’ and throw gender out as false. Let’s be clear, a feminist who is more radical and excludes trans women as not being female or women, is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It isn’t just a slur, it isn’t derogatory, it is a description of a formula of feminism, originating in 2008, to distinguish feminists who were, and who were not against inclusivity of trans women.

However, if we are to be a society that listens, accepts diversity and seeks unity rather than division, it is no good boxing people up. But why not do it by letting people choose their boxes, and letting them choose their own mix? That isn’t a threatening or undermining thing to do, and it’s the way the human species has ultimately made its way all along. What we haven’t done so well, is add equality. ‘If you’re going to be that, you can’t do this.’

That takes us on to rights. Rights. Trans rights. LGB rights. What are they? Principally, they are protections to ensure equal treatment of people who are disliked and discriminated against, not for what they choose to do, but for what they are, in their being, in their humanity.

But I don’t want rights. I just want equality. And that comes from understanding that it is me you need to understand, know and respect, not words and ideas you don’t like, or feel are confusing. You don’t need to get your inner construct sorted, or your philosophy of gender or sexuality. Don’t fit me to your ideas in order to understand what I say I am, because that will only make me acceptable to you in your terms.

Anything else simply puts me in a ‘reserve’ box because you don’t really want me to belong anywhere too close to you.

Trans is not a behavour.
Lesbian is not a behaviour.
I don’t need accommodating.
I am here.
I am.
Just like you; no less.

Subject to debate

  • Posted on May 13, 2018 at 1:42 pm

As an avid blogger for over four years, I always felt there was something important to say, something that would help incrementally educate people socialised into transmisunderstanding. I hope that I did, by being a pretty ordinary person, articulate and reflective, from the inside of my own trans experience. Well, I don’t claim to be pretty, but I am still terribly ordinary. Time has passed, and being trans is no longer a significant pert of my daily experience. I have a life to live, and this was mainly something I (belatedly) sorted out. So I don’t talk about it much any more.

Except I am still subject for debate.

A lot has changed since my realisation of late 2010, that there was a perfectly valid reason for my discomfort with myself. Overall, in this neck of the woods, and indeed in a number of other countries, understanding of gender diversity has improved. I have often written about the constant undermining by religiously-constructed culture, and we see that writ large in Trumpism and authoritarian regimes rooted in traditions. Any regression in law, in perception, in support of bigotry, is directly harming the well-being of trans and gender queer people. But it isn’t just religion or tradition, it is other ideologies, some born of resentment at the aeons of patriarchal domination, violence and subjugation.

Whatever the origins, it runs deep. Just as we have seen strides forward in media presentation of the trans and gender queer experience, so the media has facilitated the notion that human experience is up for debate. Maybe it is fear in some that equality ground gained and held by one group might sometimes be held by another, even though against the same opposition. One of the great successes of scientific method, is that any discovery, any assertion, any finding – might be upturned by another. Certainty is only as far as the next piece of research. Social understanding is far, far less fluid. We hold onto our beliefs so dearly, because our personal values are described by them. And we won’t protect another person or group, if doing so makes us eat humble pie, and step into shoes like theirs.

It feels much easier to dither. Well, maybe these trans people have a point, but maybe those feminists who think the trans people are just predators have a point too. Let’s listen to both and see if we can compromise on this?

That may be well and good, when done respectfully and reflectively. We should be thoughtful and balanced people if we want to create and maintain a fair society. What media want (social, news, documentary opinion), however, is ‘lively’ debate. Let’s be provocative, let’s be controversial, because that creates audience and audience response, and that creates financial value. And so it was that financial value was the offset to plain human respect in the Channel 4 debate in the Genderquake series this week (8 May 2018). In these debates, the subject essentially is the validity of gender being what you experience, rather than an assessment of what sex-related body parts you have, or have had, or never had. The background is mainly male violence and protection from it. That is rarely the debate though; the debate is who gets to set the game rules for being safe against male violence. Panels are therefore typically selected for being controversial feminists (called ‘well-known/respected feminists’) or for being public trans figures (called ‘trans activists’). Maybe none of them represent the groups they are associated with. Maybe they are the ones guaranteed to grate with broader opinion, or to be particularly outspoken. If the trans minority voice is heard in a less than minority way, then the ‘activists’ are perceived to be suppressing debate. Because a feminist view is more important?

Let’s rather debate the options for tackling male violence. No; let’s rather debate the problem of male social acceptability. Not just violence, but what it means to ‘be a man’.

Also this week, I watched Peter Kay’s Car Share, in which the humour is the dialogue in the confines of a daily commute. Normally scripted, the final one (and it isn’t unfunny) was not. The dialogue revolved much of the time around what was on the local radio station. This featured the music-overlaid sob stories sent in by listeners (a pale reflection of the original on Radio 2). Today’s was sent in by a woman who discovered her partner was trans the day she walked in on [them] dressed in her clothes, with two others. Apart from the narrative about this (as it transpired) genuinely trans person being misgendered, it turned out all friends in the end. Maybe Peter Kay and fellow actor were role-playing, but it was a bad one, saying how pervy and disgusting it was for men to dress as women, and then to be accepted as a friend. You know the score. Entrenched, this view encapsulates with it that men must never be feminine, that gender, that sex, is heavily polarised, and that anything else is undermining and disgusting.

We really have to talk about gender, and about what it is not. Most of all, we have to focus not on gender, but on attitudes to each other. Jesting about a trans person is abusive. Shouting ‘you’re a man’ and ‘penis’ repeatedly at a trans woman on a TV show, and not being challenged, is abusive. Instructing your child not to associate with a trans child as a friend, is abusive. Putting gender up as the subject for debate, rather than challenging male attitudes to women, is abusive. Painting trans women as all being potential predators, as being essentially male, and painting trans men as failed butch lesbians, is abusive. Disenfranchising intersex people by not even including them is thinking about sex and gender, is abusive.

Making my gender legitimate, whatever I hold it to be, is not a medical thing. Refusing my gender on grounds of male attitudes to women for thousands of years, is not the right focus. False arguments about men making a legal pretence to be female in order to legitimise invasive and abusive behaviour, is a nonsense. And yet this is precisely the context of the current proposals for changes to the Gender Recognition Act, and why discussion of it has become abusive.

Let’s just talk about respect between human beings, about what attitudes are not acceptable, and about social privilege, whatever its form. Let’s talk about why men do not really want women to be equal. Let’s imagine what this world would be like now, if we had been equal determinants of it for thousands of years.