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Vane perception

  • Posted on September 18, 2016 at 1:15 pm
Poppy Forge weather vane

When I began blogging in January 2012, I was reading extensively as a means to better self-understanding, and then writing the personal experience and response, as I was feeling it week by week. Everything was immediate, time was of the essence, much was to be done, and everyone else but me was moving at a snail’s pace. At no time did I feel I would not arrive, but frequently I thought I might arrive alone. Arriving? Was I travelling from A to B? I must have often written of this as a journey, with a beginning, a middle, and an…

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Unravelling Orlando

  • Posted on July 10, 2016 at 5:36 pm

I got shouted at from a passing car tonight. Just ordinary sexist stuff, like I should be flattered to be noticed. By a man. Or something.

On the LGBTQI spectrum, my partner and I tick several boxes between us, but we are really fortunate to live where we do. A gay colleague was in the town last night where a vigil was held for Orlando. ‘But I didn’t see anyone I knew.’ Brighton is like that. There are thousands of trans people I’ve never met here too. No, the city isn’t overrun by us, it’s just that when a place is accepting, those who need ‘acceptance’ gather more easily. I find it very reassuring and liberating to see non-hetero lovers openly and naturally out together, not least because we are not unusual.

But when we are in a different country or place I sometimes hang on tightly to my partner’s squirming hand rather than just letting it go. I got used to being looked at, at feeling my difference, because I really was noticeable at the start of my transition. I’m not now, but walking around as a lesbian couple has been a new visibility to both of us. And being safe sometimes means watching out for your visibility.

What I mean to point out, is that you sort of adapt to being a potential target. Maybe not violence, but just opinion. Maybe just a little something that tells you that you’re less than, for being not hetero-cis-normative. You can forget a time in life when it wasn’t about this. Maybe you were bullied, had a difficult time for another reason, but you grew up and the childish challenges died away. If you were bullied for your sexuality or identity, that probably did leave you scarred.

So being in a safe place, where you are with and among other people who at least have a chance of understanding, is precious. But it is a reminder that for the vast majority of us, prejudice, suspicion, misunderstanding, aversion – are always as close as the proverbial rat. However normally we live our lives, we know it is there.

The origin of normal

However normal we feel, there are those who seem to believe that we are not. Statistically, with normal being the middle range population, that might be true, but many people use normal to mean acceptable, non-deviant, in the terms of some moral framework. That moral framework isn’t intuitive, it’s taught, and the chances are that religion is involved. This is simply because moral authority has a need to be unassailable, and invoking a god to speak the moral code assures this.

A lot of Western morality is like beef stock: the bones have been taken out but the taste remains. People who have no significant religious belief still speak using its authority. And if that religion has developed past opinions about sex (even for contemporary practical reasons), the flavour remains. Sex is not bad, but open celebration of it as an expression of love is still a bit taboo. Speaking of it as fun, or bonding, or just healthy, is done with great caution, lest you be misunderstood.

Because we don’t talk about it, there is a real curiosity about how LGBTQI people have sex, or play, or love, or whatever. There are no secrets, but it’s not always like you imagine from the outside. We have relationships, we love, we commit, just like anyone else. And yet there is a deep-rooted underlying feeling that it isn’t right, that some god condemns our love, that it is something gone wrong, something abnormal, something to be cured, an illness. Or at the very least, I suspect most view it as somehow less worthy than cis-hetero love.

No. Our love is just like your love.

So when did you last feel a pang of uncertainty or fear, for making physical contact with your lover in a public place? Or a kiss, or an embrace to greet or part? Why should we? And why should we have to accept it, or expect it?

Gender identity and sexuality is something we are born with. It can’t be planted in us, and it can’t be extracted. Forcing any one of us to live as if we were not as we are, or to hide it or deny it, is violence. So yes, I blame any philosophy that attacks or denigrates us, for all our fear, for all our pains, for all our injuries.

Orlando

On June 12, 2016, over 100 people were gunned down, half were killed, and not all were LGBT. They just happened to be happy to dance with their LGBT relatives and friends. The gun issue has to be addressed, but this was not random. The Islamic extremism has to be addressed, but this wasn’t political. The gunman had visited the Pulse club, had a history on a gay app, a father who preached that god sees homosexuality as punishable, and a faith that has local preachers teaching that to kill gay people is a mercy to them. This, in a country that has a Republican party inciting fears about transgender people using toilets, from a fundamentalist Christian philosophy that denies plain observation whilst embodying the worst male traits among its members.

In the aftermath, the reporting made the homophobic nature of the crime blend into ‘an attack on all of us’. But it wasn’t. The parallel is the stand-off between #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter. Yes it was, and yes they do, but recognise that just as black Americans suffer discrimination that began with slavery, so LGBT people suffer discrimination that began with illegality.

The beef-stock morality may have cooled, but between generations its flavour is still taught and passed on, and however human it is to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex … we cannot completely relax and live unguarded as you can. It doesn’t have to be as gross as Orlando, it can be as little as loosening your hands in public.

We still have some way to go.

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Orlando

  • Posted on June 14, 2016 at 11:17 pm

It is for God to punish
says his father, and a mother
in another country says she hates
the woman her daughter
must hide in a closet
when her uncles come.

My partner wriggles her hand
free from mine, unsure
because this isn’t Brighton;
they stand at passport control
separately, just in case,
and the sun beats down.

I was lucky, he says, I did
gymnastics with the girls,
kept a low profile and learned
which way to walk home, funny
how so many I know now
were bullied at school.

A man cries in a crowd
in another language, as
thousands, and thousands of miles
apart, are together tonight
showing recognition, naming
a shared sorrow and fear.

A father leans forward
in a theatre, speaks his
objection to two girls kissing,
thinking of his daughters
the infection, not the
affection without fear.

A mother lives in fear, her
daughter’s lover shut,
a father lives in fear because
he was taught a god, and taught
his son, who beat himself, down,
Pulse racing to shoot.

People who don’t pray, pray
for the souls wrapped
around bullets, and people who do
try to forget who god punishes,
pray for mothers, not lovers;
my lover loosens her hand.

We never quite forget, as you can,
that the fear is ours, that
a touch, a kiss, is twisted out and
into disgust, our loves denied,
existence erased, or laughed off
with taught lines, from sacred places.

We are people you can make
laws about, lies about, forget
that this was another Target
entitling one breath to close
a toilet door, a cupboard, another
to extol faith, text, gun, a good son.

 

Notes:

  • Living with my lesbian partner where it’s illegal to be gay (Iran)
  • On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American-born Afghan Muslim, killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a shooting inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. He was by all accounts himself gay.
  • Target is the second largest discount retailer in the US, which drew (largely Republican Christian) transphobic attention by disregarding state ‘bathroom bills’ requiring transgender people to only use toilets matching the gender on their birth certificates.

2016 © Andie Davidson

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Transgender Day of Visibility

  • Posted on March 28, 2016 at 8:48 pm

March 31st. It’s the end of the year of accounting for many, when all the bills and income are balanced and reported. Profit or loss, tax overpaid, or tax overdue; was value added, or was it just a taxing time. My ambivalence about this date also being assigned International Transgender Day of Visibility is unsurprising. It is the mental battle between ‘Why should I need to be visible’ and ‘Thank goodness enough people were visible for me to come out and go through my transition’. This blog by itself leaves me highly visible. It could have been anonymous, but four years ago it was a way of speaking to people who knew me as much as those who did not. Now it is out there, it is a reminder that whilst from day to day being trans is not on my mind, it is on others’, and a simple Google search reveals everything.

I am not going to join any procession, or indulge in online selfies though. I do believe that trans people should be active, not hidden, but I think that being present is more useful most of the time, than being something special. The selfies inhibition cuts both ways. If a huge splash of selfies shows that there can be no expectations of what any trans person should look like, and also avoids an impression of anything other than ordinariness, well and good. I don’t want my ‘passing privilege’ to become anyone’s paradigm, but neither do I want too much bizarre devil-may-care to make being trans seem like a wacky lifestyle decision, because it is not.

And so on International Transgender Day of Visibility, I shall not be hiding. In fact in all likelihood, I shall be seeing some old colleagues for the first time in a few years, some of whom have shown visible disquiet when my LinkedIn profile threw up the switch-over in 2012. I shall just be there in continuity of friendships, not to make a point.

Visible as not invisible

I have watched over the past weeks and months as US states have thrown up House Bills on what they call ‘bathroom protections’. The situation is entirely absurd. They are creating laws that oblige bearded, muscular, testosterone-dosed trans men to enter women-only toilets or sports changing-rooms, whether or not they have a vagina or a penis. And trans women with ample cleavages, similarly, to stand in line with men grasping their penises. Why? Because enough ignorant people spread the rumour with a zero evidence base, that transwomen (not trans men) are predatory or paedophile. Partly, it is a matter of common sense, partly pure ignorance, and partly malicious. There’s no point, really, rehearsing the ridiculous situation of examining the genitals of one person to protect the apparent privacy of another. Nor the situations that have already arisen of cis women who don’t look feminine enough, or men who look too feminine. Nor indeed the oversight that women don’t pee in fear of a lesbian in the next stall, nor men in fear of the next penis in line belonging to a gay man.

If trans people are invisible, this kind of stupidity will persist. If they are hyper-visible, they will be misunderstood as choosers of their destiny, where trans women are presumed clothing-fetishists, and trans men are, well, probably butch-lesbian. And it does no favours to the very many people who are androgynous, gender queer or simply gender fluid. Why does anyone have to be something specific in order to go to the loo? I see more gender neutral loos these days, and they are very welcome. Providing men don’t pee on the floor, and treat the facilities with respect, it’s no different to the loo in any family home.

Oh, so you want to be a voyeur, and spy on people having a pee? And you like going around in disguise, to get away with the attempt? And you are neither gay nor lesbian? I suppose you know that this is already illegal … It has bugger all to do with the one to two percent of the population being transgender, and any new ‘bathroom bill’ can only place these people in danger.

The moon was visible last night. Well, actually I was asleep, but it must have been. No; wait; we had storms, so probably it was cloudy. But maybe there were breaks. Did you see it? Ah! The astronauts in the International Space Station can vouch for it, because they had no clouds, and went round fast enough to catch it several time. The moon didn’t come out specially to prove anything, and I sort of know that the moon was still there like yesterday. Visibility means that no-one is pretending the moon does not exist, so whatever time of day or night, you might see it. Under the right conditions, it won’t be obscured, and even a new moon shows a pale disk to the careful eye. Some trans people are a full moon, some a crescent, some behind clouds, others scarcely noticeable at all. No-one should be obliged to hide, and none should be obliged to reveal all, as if we were all completely unambiguous anyway.

What is visibility?

Visibility, I think, is not about clearing the clouds away, nor about being bright and shiny. Visibility is about opening your eyes and doing your best to see. An International Transgender Day of Visibility should be about saying: ‘Hey, didn’t you know that millions of people are transgender, it is inherent not acquired, and it has absolutely nothing to do with sex drive, mental illness, criminality or predation.’ Almost 100 percent of that is down to heterosexual, strongly gender-binary males. And transgender women, whatever we are on a gender scale, are not that!

What they day needs to portray and be reported as, is that transgender identity is only partly about trans women, the majority is about trans men, gender queer, androgyny, gender fluidity …

Unfortunately, it is a religious right-wing that has taken it upon itself to assign predation, spread fear, and place us instead in danger. They infect parents and schools, and force trans people into invisibility, fear of discovery and hatred, and for too many, to suicide. Yes, dear loving-god-loving kind people: your bigotry and narrow-mindedness has zero to do with protecting anything other than your own stupidity. We are visible, we are here, and you simply refuse to see it.

So if you remember on March 31st, or see a news report, reminding you of the International Transgender Day of Visibility, it isn’t about the big personalities, it isn’t about fetishists, and certainly nothing about sexual mores, or perversions. It’s about human beings with small differences, who, if only your eyes were open, are already living among you, and always have. It’s a day for opening your eyes and seeing what is there instead of acquiring false fears from stupid people who should know better, and who, if they do believe in being loving and protective, would do better to shut up and sit down.

Happy ITDoV!

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My transgender regret

  • Posted on February 27, 2016 at 8:15 pm

I was looking through some photos from not so many years ago, of a band I play in. I think I was being a bit curious, because anything more than five years ago feels like a lifetime ago. It wasn’t of course, but two things have happened: first I transitioned, and second, I have had to find a new relationship with that old self. I do sometimes want to dip back as a way of marvelling at how I am now. They aren’t pictures I want to hide, but similarly not ones I want to show. The relationship with that old self is a very private one.

I don’t see myself. I see someone I know was me, but somehow I can’t find myself in their skin anymore. I remember the places, I remember what I was doing, even who I was with or talking to. But I can’t put myself in that skin, in my mind. I wonder whether it is a kind of denial, or a kind or protection, or just an impossibility because I feel so differently authentic now. I feel uncomfortable looking at that old self, and I know that I never liked what I saw in the mirror all those years. I look at the haircut, and I remember that it was like that because it was pleasing someone else. Coming back from a haircut was a feeling very similar to putting on an overcoat. I never liked wearing one. I did own three over the years, the last was virtually unworn, expensive, and was given afterwards to a friend. Each time I wore an overcoat, I was putting on someone else’s desire to be something, and each time it was uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. That the hair or the coat pleased someone I loved, never made it good, though maybe it was a comfort and a kindness to them to play the part.

I am sitting at the back of the band, in Belgium. I don’t want to be this person. I want to remember that time as I am now. I want the white blouse, band scarf and short black skirt. I want long blonde hair. It isn’t what I see, and I want to push it away, but I want to have been there still.

This is what transition regret means

It isn’t the tiny percentage of people who interpret their gender discomfort inadequately. It isn’t wishing I could have been comfortable as I was all those years. It isn’t wishing I was not born with all that conflict ahead of me, able to be a fully normal boy, brother, man, husband, father. It is wishing that I could have recognised and been able to find authenticity from the start. When I wrote ‘I love me’ on my school pencil case, I wish someone had said: ‘Fantastic! Go and be fully yourself, express yourself, because then you will be able to love securely and honestly without fear.’ Instead, I was strongly reprimanded for arrogance, for pride, for putting myself first, if only for a moment with a felt-tip pen and a pencil case and a thought.

I see a picture of myself now, and wish that this album hadn’t started so far on in life. I look at myself in the mirror and am filled with a profound gratitude still, that I feel and look so right. The shoulders are too broad, the waist not slim, the hips too narrow, the hair too thin – but I recognise myself and I see myself fully as a woman. This, really is me, not the person in the not too old photos. Who is that person, if this is me?

I am loved. I have someone who tells me I look pretty, who forgives the shoulders, waist and hips – who doesn’t think of me daily as trans, because it really doesn’t matter. I don’t hide the old pictures from her. I don’t have to hide anything anymore. I don’t need permission to express myself, like the person on the photos.

This is what transgender regret means

It means knowing that life has been spent less than it could have been. That for so many years no-one else could see the real me, lived as I feel. Regret that I had to lie, to pretend, and to play a part, about things I didn’t understand myself. Regret that all that spent life is discreet, put away, not fully spoken about, owned more by others’ memories than my own, much of it in albums on bookshelves elsewhere, not here. Like my medical and official records transferred to a special place, so that no-one need know that there was this other person, with a different birth certificate, known by another name and title for all their qualifications.

Transgender regret for me means a life divided. Half with wishes unfulfilled, a person disowned. Half released into myself to be who I am. It means my past not being freely part of social conversation with others. Being guarded against slips that might suddenly change the conversation, and make me a curiosity. Nothing repairs that, ever. I don’t want that other person to be thought of as a sad figure, as hiding or deceitful. I don’t want that person to be remembered as what I used to be, as if that was more real because it was for so much longer. I don’t want people to feel privileged by knowing, and being able to tell others gleefully: ‘don’t you know, she used to be a …’.

Nothing ever stopped, life was never suspended, and there is no single point at which I was not the same person. But there certainly was a period of a few years, when lots of people had to make up their minds about what to do over me. And nothing has even for a moment made me wish I had hung onto who, where and what I was. The regret is not in the losing; that can happen to anyone. It isn’t a way of saying my life was wasted in any way, because it wasn’t.

No; transgender regret for me means having to have built up a history, a life of memories, that was always less than it could have been, for want of recognition that I could have been this, authentic, self. It means that I do not want to drag that person out of my history to challenge, recall or compare with all that I now am. Yes, the photo is of me, but I don’t want it to be part of my conversation, and that divides my life into the spoken and unspoken.

I can do that; I know, as I look in the mirror, that I – the same I – have found my true representation, and that it is good. I can know. But I don’t want to offer that comparison to anyone else; it can only be dealt with privately. Not because I feel in any way insecure or indecisive, but because others won’t feel my gratitude, only the wonder that this was how I used to be and isn’t that amazing?

So if you thought that Google had thrown up this page to tell you that transgender people have regret about transition, then it isn’t in the way you thought. You have a history in one volume, fully cross-referenced. I am only offering you volume two, and I don’t want to open volume one except in particular, selective circumstances.

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