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Permission? Tell me about your childhood …

  • Posted on March 9, 2013 at 1:42 pm

aspects of love diagramOver the course of counselling, I have prepared or gathered my thoughts by sketching diagrams to relate all my possible feelings about something. I start with words on the page, positioned intuitively as blobs, then join them up as they seem most naturally to relate, and a picture emerges in a fresh, clearer way. I have one on emotions, for example, with a big black blob in the middle called ‘undermining self’ linked to ‘exclusion’, ‘anger’ dissonance’. Another is on love, with the sexy ‘excitement’ and ‘thrill’ bursting out the top, but this much bigger iceberg zone with ‘trust’, ‘commitment’, ‘bonding’, ‘togetherness’, ‘wholeness’ below the waterline. Then I have one centred around ‘core self-beliefs’, surrounded by ‘validation’, acceptance’, ‘connection’, ‘self-esteem’. These aren’t complete descriptions of the diagrams, but they are interesting to return to and ponder.

Then I came to the appreciation that the root of my emotional responses to not being loved as I thought I had been, was this whole business of permission, and the way I grew up as a child to understand it.

Now before I continue, some of you reading this will be thinking I am being unreasonable on the issue of not being loved as I thought. Yes, I was loved by my wife, and we looked after each other very well in our 32 years. We cared a lot, the sex was very comforting, if pretty vanilla. It was fulfilling in terms of bonding, if unadventurous. We supported each other through employment traumas, through illness, and loved each other in these ways faithfully the whole time. So I am not denying any of that, only that I now realise that the very fact I could not share my need for help, the very fact that I was frightened to disclose my problems, was because I knew there were limits to being accepted, and that I could exceed permissions by which that love was bounded. Had it been a worry about a congenital disease, or cancer, or mental health, I could have spoken. Impotence? We’d have coped with that. But this?

I was (and we all do this), living by permission. I can only do what the other allows. It’s not the same as ‘tie me but don’t spank me’ kind of permission, which is about respect (and no, I never was into BDSM in any way), or ‘booze with your pals so long as you come home quietly and don’t disturb me’ (I’ve never really been drunk). This is not about tolerance, but letting the other grow and live safely as themselves, as all they can be. It’s about not setting boundaries (even ‘don’t ask don’t tell’) where the other only feels loved for being and doing what the other approves of.

Tell me about your childhood

It is clear now that much derives from upbringing. I always knew I could never be good enough. Which is strange, given my performance at school.

Were we poor? I think probably we were, but our family values were a veneer of being a class above the reality. Others were honestly poor, we were respectable, and that meant hiding quite a lot, in retrospect. But a core value was that any pride or self-satisfaction, any celebration of achievement would lead to arrogance. Therefore, any sense of self-esteem being shared with another was bad. So I passed my 11 plus and went to grammar school? That was simply as it should be. So in my first year there, I had scarlet fever (curiously self-diagnosed correctly before seeing a doctor, and without the Internet). I was off school between the period of taking exams in every subject, and the results being given. I came top in just about every subject except Art. A great surprise to me, but this was simply as it should be. I did it again and again. If that was my natural place, it was just a natural place. I was a soloist with two instruments at school, and after a performance this was just as it should be. If this is what you can do, then without need of praise or pride, this is simply what you do. Nothing was special; nothing was good enough for reward. And so I found myself in 1980, surrounded by friends jumping up and down with delight for their 2:2 degrees, reporting simply on the phone that I had indeed received the only first in my subject. It was a very ordinary day. A simple thing. As it should be.

So having a successful marriage was not just unusual, it was nothing to celebrate. Being loved as I was, was not a recognition of anything about me. It was simply fitting. And so being rejected for being the wrong fit (see last blog) was, once more, not being able to be ever good enough to be wanted.

What a legacy! I can never be good enough to be truly loved.

Permission

In this setting, there is no permission to celebrate. I remember my wife saying in the past that I should celebrate more my achievements. That I should reward myself for good things and feel good about myself. When I reminded her of this regarding my feelings of achieving self-hood in terms of fulfilling my true gender, of course I was back to square one. ‘I can’t celebrate it, so don’t expect to celebrate it here.’ I spent far too many decades of my life living within the permission of others. Permission to have things, to give things, to think things, to celebrate being. How could I ever have believed that life should be so small as to live in fear that stepping over someone’s line of who I was allowed to be, was a requirement of love?

We give so much away, and reduce ourselves so much, all for the sake of acceptance and approval, without which our core beliefs seem challenged. Maybe we aren’t right whenever someone disagrees or won’t allow us simply to be? I still walk past things in Tesco telling myself I’m not allowed to have that. I still have things in my freezer that I tell myself I must save until I can share it with someone else. Why? I used to look in the fridge frequently, seeing something nice, believing it must be for the kids, or some special reason, never for me.

I have lived in self-denial in many ways, all my life. Layer that with the whole business of gender, and I feel a long way from the possibility of being loved for all that I am, and even believing that I ever could be, let alone that I ever have been.

One phrase I have often used in the past few months, is my response to the tentative enquiry: ‘Are you happy?’ The only thing I can say is ‘If I had known I was allowed to be this happy with myself, I’d have done this a very long time ago.’ Despite those closest to me rejecting me for being this. This is my permission to self, out-facing everyone else for the first time in my life.

Transition

My real transition at this rather late juncture, is not my gender presentation. I have always been what I am, but I didn’t know and I didn’t allow myself a higher permission. No, my transition is from living by permission to loving myself.

That’s a long journey from the day I wrote ‘I love me’ on a pencil case (everyone else was naming a girlfriend), and had it instantly obliterated by my mother because self-love was arrogance and forbidden.

I have transitioned from being what you need me to be, to who I am; from being loved providing I presented the right shape, to being who I am in the face of maybe never being the right shape for anyone ever again. I have transitioned from the conditional life, to freedom. It happens to involve moving from living as a man, to simply living. I am a woman, and I need no-one’s permission to say that.

What hasn’t changed is who and what I am. I am a lovely person. I have my faults, and I know that. I can be a bit too vocal, a bit overbearing at times. But I am one of the kindest, most loving, committing and considerate people you might wish for. I share and give freely, I help and support openly. I am intelligent without being arrogant, thoughtful without being obstructive (OK, most of the time!), I am intuitive, creative, expressive and honest. I have so much to give. I even want to discover generous sex as something I can receive, not just give. I know that the second half of my life is one that leads into growing old, but I want to share that experience with another. I want a lover, I want a companion, I want shared happiness. Not the avoidance of problems and life-tangles, but someone who can massage my knots away as I do theirs.

I love myself. And finally, I realise, I need no permission. Somewhere, they may be someone for me who has found the same. I do hope so.

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Fear, revisited; a picture

  • Posted on February 16, 2013 at 4:33 pm

take a pebbleThere’s a picture I really wanted, but agreed without comment not to claim, because my ex wanted it and said so first. I’m not going to suggest tearing it in half, however symbolic that may be, but I could try contacting the artist Bob Seymour for a copy.

It’s a large photo (the one on the left is not it), colour, but only greys, a close-up of a smooth pebble emerging and drying from the water of a shoreline so it almost looks like a bright moon. Bearing in mind one of my favourite poems ‘For Your Hand’, it might seem most appropriate to leave it anyway. It is symbolic for that reason: I am smooth and round, emerging and being more beautiful for what I have become than what I used to be. I had to lose a lot to be what I am.

And it was a 26th wedding anniversary gift to each other.

I remember walking down the road in the sunshine in Hartland, Devon, where we were on holiday at the time, and I was in torment. It was over four years ago and I still hadn’t a clue that people could be transgender. I was just tearing myself apart inside, the ‘silent scream’, as I called it, was a crescendo. In retrospect, we were just both very frightened.

And it was all over a pair of tights.

Yes, I know, to you and most people, and to my wife at the time, that means something (nudge, nudge, wink, wink; know what I mean?) about sex. No, about fetish! What else could it be? And what could be worse? I was in effect asking permission to do what I had been doing for some time, to be allowed to wear very limited and unseen female things on a daily basis, but also to share it, not hide it from her. Yes, it felt nice too, very nice. It felt right, and I wanted acceptance. And if it was just a sex thing, maybe that could be alright, but ironically, not if it meant anything else. I didn’t understand it, I knew it wasn’t wanted, it felt such a small thing, but it was a huge issue. We were both facing fear of something with unexpected consequences.

What does this make a man, when he starts experimenting with things that only women wear, and it isn’t just because it keeps him warm on his dumper truck? (Yes, many men wear tights for comfort and warmth. I know, because a nurse casually checked with me once when she needed a bare ankle for an ECG electrode.) It’s scary. Either he is just a bit weird, or something is happening that feels beyond control.

What did it make me, when I felt right doing things that everyone else would see as wrong? Not optional, variant; wrong. Later it became ‘you can do that so long as I don’t have to see’. So I knew that there was something seriously wrong with me; I just hadn’t a clue what.

So, with a pair of tights asphyxiating our wedding anniversary, we went to buy this picture. We came away with not just the pebble, but four – and our fear. With our separate fears. I was reminded by her this week, of the fear that I engendered in her, and how I had been vociferous in defending myself and denying that it meant I wanted to be a woman. It didn’t even seem possible to me, and I couldn’t see why it would mean that anyway. Readers of my blog will know I was still saying this when I started writing it in January 2012. By then everyone else seemed to know but me. They were just waiting for it to happen. But back in 2008, I was still in love after 26 years and I too was living in total fear that whatever was tearing me apart would tear us apart. And I so wanted to let free whatever it was, and travel with my wife, together.

I knew even then, that I could only be loved by suppressing whatever it was that seemed an irresistible force and energy within me. Can you imagine being in love, after 26 years, and coming to realise that something bigger that you, that had always been there, was coming to light to destroy it? It must be like living in a country all your life, and having a knock on the door at three in the morning to be told you have no right of citizenship, and will be put on a plane forthwith and returned to a strange place you have never known, away from your family, your lover, all that seems familiar and safe.

That was our fear, unvoiced, misunderstood. There was something about me that could mean I would never belong as a lover again. Denial? Or fear? This was not choosing about doing; this was the beginning of choosing about being.

And there is nothing so scary as being, because it is essential. Sometimes it is enough just to be. But if being true to self means you are no longer wanted by the people you care most about, are committed to and loyal to, ‘just being’ is very frightening indeed.

And for my wife at the time? Being herself meant that she could never entertain intimacy with a woman. Her insulation from this dilemma is that I changed. I had been loved for being a man; it made her the woman she wanted to be. The choice, in the end, was clear: be a man or you cannot be my lover. I had no such insulation, because this was me, not some addition, some lifestyle choice; this was what I knew I had always been, coming out. For her, I really did use to be a man, so everything that went before was legitimate. I now know that everything that went before was not, from my perspective, legitimate at all.

My gender has not changed. My understanding of it has, and no-one is to blame. But however I felt I had to be at the time, however taught, and whatever I believed was the way I had to live my life, I was a woman, albeit stuck with a male body. And that made me look normal. I did what I could with what I had – until I began to fall apart, and the ‘pain of being a man’ became unavoidable. And the fear, not just the periodic self-anger and self-hate, kicked in.

It’s alright, I know you can’t understand this; nobody without this experience can, really. You will tell me I was a man (some people will in ignorance tell me that I still am). The body is not what defines you. Your gender does not change. Nor is there a choice. I completed a questionnaire this week that asked: ‘Do you identify as …’ (choose from the following list of sexualities and gender expressions). ‘Identify’ is quite the wrong word. Do you ‘identify as’ what you are? You can choose descriptors, but identity is more than description; Descartes did not say ‘I think, therefore I identify as alive’.

So this is a story about fear. A pebble that represents me, emerging smooth and round. A picture that cannot be shared, like a moon that will never rise again, on a wall that is as much mine as hers. It is her fear and it is mine, that came to be fulfilled. She married a woman; OK, a trans-woman if you must. But she is safe, because for her, I was a man. I am not safe, because I know I was not. In my ignorance, my love for her was fraudulently given.

I faced many fears in therapy, that became very real suicidal thoughts and intentions. Many fears, like being able to transition successfully, find work and be accepted, were groundless, but my fear, like that anniversary day in 2008, is that I may never find legitimacy in sexual love, because no-one really understands what being me is all about, especially when I say I was born female. Could you love me, without being made to feel gay, or lesbian, or bi, or something you cannot imagine ever being? And how could you even be a real lesbian if you don’t think I am a real woman, or truly hetero if you think I used to be a man, and so on … What would I make you?

Yes, I still have very real fears, and if they mean loss of identity, that’s where I come unstuck all over again. Picture me instead as a pebble, the result of much loss, shaped, left – and if you dare, pick me up simply for what is beautiful about me. Nothing more.

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Sex

  • Posted on January 12, 2013 at 12:18 am

Oh, sorry, haven’t I mentioned it before? No, it hasn’t a lot to do with gender I suppose. But this is one of those really niggly bits of the loss and attachment equation that I have yet to get my head around. It isn’t just friends and observers of trans* people who wonder about our sexuality when we transition, and it is admittedly confusing. Stuff yourself with hormones and you can’t be surprised if you feel a bit different. I don’t actually think it’s changed me a lot, apart from shunting my sex drive into a siding. I was never attracted in the slightest by another man, and I don’t believe that it was an aversion due to my feeling an outsider in the gender game. I just was never gay. But I was reflecting with my psychiatrist at Charing Cross before Christmas, that my acute need to have a girlfriend in my teens was as much the freedom to identify with female company as it was a directly sexual urge. I do know that I just felt safe to be with a girl, and less safe not to. My relationship with women must always have held that sense of safety in being me with them that was so different from feeling an outsider among men.

So what now? I have already admitted that the person who made me feel most a woman post-transition, was a man. That woke me up to the possibility that intimacy with a man was no longer out of the question, and it wasn’t just losing an aversion. What if I was actually loved by a man? Well, I may never know! A lesbian friend pointed out that I am not exactly presenting as a lesbian myself either, rather as a very ordinary, if slightly elegant, middle-aged woman. And yet (though maybe it is just experience over a lifetime) it is the way women love that still comforts me most.

Which brings me back to attachment and its relation to attraction.

Do people really only form real attachments so they can have sex? It certainly is very bonding, and I guess when you have had sex with the same person maybe more than five thousand times, and can’t remember more than one or two times when it wasn’t a wonderful and lovely thing to share, you must be pretty firmly bonded. But I guess it is just as true that if another person isn’t attractive, or ceases to be so, then it isn’t as obvious to have sex and bond. But lots of things make people unattractive, from illness to behaviour to age. Oh, and switching their gender presentation. So is sexual attraction the electromagnetism of attachment? Switch it off and everything falls apart?

What really happens to attachment, and what have you lost? A sex partner? Or a real partner with whom you bonded through sex? What were you attached to – just the attractive part? And was the attachment dependent on sexual bonding?

This has quite floored me, because for all my letting-go ruminations in a previous blog (to be continued) I am still searching for one good reason to wave 32 very good years of partnership goodbye. Does sexual intimacy have to depend on a binary idea? Or can attraction be learned (if you want to, of course), and just as being old and wrinkly or impotent need not stop people loving each other – and being wonderfully comforting and intimate – can late transition be a process of learning wonderful and loving things over again? (Simply because the other person is valued, even lovely in their own right?)

Maybe it is a case of not seeing the wood for the trees, because we have been conditioned, and have conditioned ourselves to see the obvious. My attitude to life has increasingly become one of ‘why not?’. It has always been the way I work, but even more now, the way I think about self-expression. I really did think that partnership and intimacy could survive, that new things could be learned and that things that felt nice to do before, since they would be done the same way and feel the same, could go on being done. But I guess I was looking at the wood. (Look, I’m sorry, if that’s a double entendre for you, if so, just think ‘forest’! – or is that just as bad?)

Looking back on the past ten months and my complete loss of any intimacy, let alone anything remotely sexual, I can’t help realising what a proportionately small part sex actually played. I don’t think it helped me go to work, drive safely, fix the house or mow the grass, or enjoy a night out for a meal or a film. I miss both intimacy and partnership. The complete absence of intimacy is desperately hard for me; it’s like sensory deprivation and at times is a torture. The company can be filled in, and I have enjoyed the company of lovely friends since living alone. I am free to spontaneously change plans, see who I like and when, entertain and be entertained, and be with women without fear of it looking like an affair. But in the end, that 32 years of daily communication, reassuring and being reassured, being welcomed and welcoming, listening and being heard, ended abruptly just because I would never have been chosen as a sexual partner as a woman, feels bewildering and nonsensical. To me. I don’t miss it, I miss us.

The eyes have it

It is a real irony that people say what lovely eyes I have. They like the way I do my make-up, but they say my eyes show who I am, and are feminine. But they really are the same eyes. I don’t do anything different with them! I seem to remember that it was my eyes that were attractive in the beginning, long before I took any clothes off. And I can’t help thinking that a lot of the way I have always been, as a partner, as a lover, even as a parent, was always a part and expression of what I am seen to be now. So some essence of Andie the woman was part of being attractive. Certainly I was different in many ways, a bit unusual. But so long as it was a different kind of man, that was OK.

So I am still stumped. How can I ever be attractive enough to generate the kind of bonding that might create partnership and attachment? Because I haven’t a clue. Everything I believed has been undermined by experience. I gave everything, and suddenly nothing was good enough. When I say ‘bewildered’, that is what I mean. It feels like arriving, but finding yourself alone in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to get you out. Not even a map.

Sex? It doesn’t just mean fucking, to me; it means expressing love through affection, intimacy, touch, arousal and the greatest tenderness with the greatest vulnerability. Will I ever experience that again, if the element of attraction has gone forever, even with someone I knew so well for so long? And will I ever know real attachment again? Or is attachment itself a bad thing? Is partnership something else, that I have never really understood, that is a lesser thing than I thought?

Somehow I lost everything, and I don’t even know if I am allowed to expect even a shadow of what I had ever again. I just didn’t realise that I needed a wholly unambiguous gender identity in order to have that kind of personal value.

So here we are. Sex? Partnership? Commitment? I am bewildered, though of course to you it might just all be so obvious you wonder why I even think these things …

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Transgender relativity

  • Posted on November 18, 2012 at 8:35 am

Now, let me guess; what is this blog going to be about? Ah! That when you’re transitioning, you can’t travel faster than the speed of light. Sadly true, but no!

OK… I know! Matter and energy can be equated: when something really matters to you, you have boundless energy to achieve it? Again, there’s truth in that, but no.

Alright; it’s just a neat way of speaking about families as quanta? That bonds only have statistical probabilities? Or the fact that you can’t be two things at once – but really you can? Or that the gravity of transitioning is a function of the space you fill and the time it takes?

No. It’s going to be about relating. It’s about people together, how they interact, and some of the reasons for that. I’m not being academic about it, just observing. Just sayin’…

We spend a lot of time talking about relating as families, as friends, as more than friends, as partners.

As far as family are concerned, I have just become a daughter. I love it. My mum may never really come to grips with it, because it may just be too late, too many years of being one thing. A daughter? It’s just relative. I have become a sister too. Again, it has changed the way I feel I relate. I like it; it works. I will always have fathered children, and I have covered this before. It is the most difficult, because I will never be a mother. If possible, I just want to be Andie, who still is a parent, out of the zone of dependency, admiring my children, and simply wanting recognition and respect, and a desire to understand how I was born the way I was. Maybe one day. My family was always relatively small. Now it is relatively smaller.

Family relationships are built to a large extent on roles. Those roles change anyway through phases of life, but this change has not in fact changed roles.

To some friends I have become an honorary sister, which I find lovely, wholly accept and am finding a new richness in. I can go out with another woman, and there really is nothing in it, except the privilege of sisterhood. We can even talk about relationships, or cry, or laugh. Or all three at once. To other friends we just carry on as before, with pronoun changes, maybe a change in what jokes may be acceptably presented to me, but relatively unchanged.

I don’t have a partner, so I can’t say much here. But I know, having expanded into my natural space, how I relate will be different – if it ever happens again.

Something’s cooking

One book I bought when moving into my own place was Delia Smith’s One is Fun. (For those too young or not habitually in the kitchen: recipes for the single person.) Does being single make cooking fun? I actually enjoy cooking now I get to do it. (OK, have to do it.) In fact I like it so much I think I may have discovered pan-sexuality.

And yes, I missed one out from my list: ‘more than friends’.

Many trans* people, on losing the rigidity or binary nature of gender, or at least of the binding of physiology and mind/soul, come to realise the paradoxes of sexuality. If gender is fluid, or non-binary, or detached from the genitals, so may sexuality. It does not mean you don’t know what you are, but you might not know straight away, and you might yet be surprised. For a number of trans* people, sexual intimacy is simply what can ensue with someone you really love. So this woman has a penis? And this man used to have breasts? Is it still intuitively wrong because you are not gay, or not lesbian? It isn’t wrong any more – or rather, it isn’t inappropriate any more, because you let go the matrix and go with your feelings. Love is expressed with what you have got. Hence a steer towards pansexuality. ‘What sex are you really?’ loses its basis in what you see. Love, trust and respect take over from ticking the standard boxes.

The nature of attraction can change for all sorts of reasons: you love a woman more than you used to a man, or vice versa, and find heterosexuality wasn’t as anchored as you thought. You want to express love rather than have the ‘right kind’ of sex. But is doesn’t always change, and there is no scale of predictability. And I do recognise that hormones play a role, either shutting them off or taking them in. But again, not predictably.

It’s still all relative.

And the sense of what you are is still influenced by what people think or say you are. I still have to fully come to terms with the difference between how I feel and what others see. I may get up in the morning and go to work without an ounce of doubt that I am a woman. Once there, a new employee may take one look at me and ask someone else why that woman over there looks a bit different. Isn’t there something about her? Yes. She used to be a man. Frankly, that is what most people will say. Am I a woman? Or just a woman who used to be a man? Is it all just relative? To me, no.

Paradoxes of relativity – and surprise

Trans* relativity can be an enduring discomfort, which is part of why some realise they can never quite be what they want to be, despite all available treatments and surgery. We are who we are, and we are what we are, and some people will never treat those two equally. They may want one, but not the other. For so many, this is the one point at which the marriage vows become very relative too. All that I, am I give? All that I have, I share? Except you didn’t mention the just cause or impediment, and had I known, I would have given, shared, and promised nothing. You broke the contract by being yourself. But what are you? A ‘real’ man? A ‘real’ woman? Or just a woman who used to be a man? Doesn’t it scare you just a little bit when you read your marriage vows, however they were phrased? Aren’t they just impossibly unconditional? What hope of ever exchanging such grand promises to anyone ever again?

If I could change my skeleton for a female one, of course I would. Instead I choose clothes that make the most of a bad job. And as far as I can, I don’t even think about what I ‘used to be’, because that was just the outside. My heart and soul are the same. What I can give is the same. The way I love is the same. Sex? As always, unchanged, I will be loving and generous with what I have, even though what I have will also change. So who wants my love, and does it matter how relative my ‘woman’ is?

As an observer of my transitioning life, I am always as surprised as anyone. The acceptance I have found, from women especially, has at times overwhelmed me. I am one too; welcome to the sorority. Male acceptance? Sometimes cool. But for me, the worst part is the men who having asked, treat me as the woman who used to be a man. Used to be a man, will understand the humour, the suggestion, the sex/gender edginess, the mindset. Sorry guys; it never was my mindset, so don’t put that one on me now either.

And my biggest surprise? That the person who has made me feel most authentic as a woman – is a man.

It’s all a matter of relativity.

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