GenderBendy

Daddio forever

My dear children whom I love more than anything,

In December I asked you to come up with something else to call me besides “Daddio,” and to start using female pronouns when talking to me and about me. Then I pushed you, hard. I did it because each year before Christmas for many years I have grieved all over again for my mother’s death and yearned desperately for the acceptance I will never get from her. I was feeling extremely needy, and in my need I turned to you. That was a parenting fail. It is not your job, at this stage in your lives, to parent me, nor, for that matter, to play any role for anyone, no matter how much you love them. It is your job to continue to work on figuring out who you are going to be in the world and to move toward your versions of adulthood, and it is my job to support you in your growing up. I’m back to doing that, and I’m sorry I faltered.

I withdraw my request that you stop calling me “Daddio.” That word is full of love and the history of who we have been together all through your childhood, and I don’t want to lose it or what it represents. So, I welcome “Daddio” as long as you want to keep using it...for the rest of our lives, if you want.

I do still hope that in your own time, when you feel ready, you could start using female pronouns for me, and that you will stay open to the idea of finding other new things to call me which include recognition of who I am now. I say this because while I *am* still the same dad you have always known, I am also in a real way a woman you’ve only just met. It’s like, “Um...hi. My name’s Lisa, and I’ve been lurking inside your dad all these years...actually, I *was* him, but in disguise. Now I’m standing here right in front of you as my actual self. So, anyway, um...nice to finally meet you...and, uh, I feel like baking...what kind of cookies do you want?"

Trans *is* weird, but it's a thing that can be gotten used to, and we are all such smart people and have so much love between us, I’m sure that over time we can find creative positive ways to incorporate my true gender into our family dynamic. And regardless of what you call me or what pronouns you use, I’m here for you, and I always will be. No doubt I will falter again from time to time...I’m only human...but I’m here.

Now, go finish your homework.

Love,

Daddio/Lisa/E/Zabi...etc. etc.

Insight on the holiday gauntlet

One day as the Christmas season approached Elizabeth told her 16-year-old son that she wanted him to stop calling her “Daddio.” She told him that every time he said it it felt like being punched in the stomach. Looking uncomfortable, he reluctantly agreed. The next day, she followed up: she said she was repeating the request so he knew she was serious about it, and that she also wanted female pronouns and gender words. He listened silently and did not refuse; but as the week went on he used the same masculine gender words as before, and scowled at her when she corrected him.

A few days later, when Elizabeth picked her daughter up from college, she told her that she was asking these things of her too. Her daughter, having recently claimed Queer identity herself, was more accepting, at least to talk about it, but as the days passed she avoided pronouns rather than switching to “she,” and also still said “Daddio.”

Several days went by. Elizabeth wept often, thinking of her long-dead mother, as she often did in the weeks before Christmas each year, with grief and fury and aching need for maternal comfort all balled together in a black mass...and her will to push her children to greater acceptance faltered. She couldn't see a way to back off from having pushed them without returning to the old bad man-box, but she knew it was wrong to have turned to them in her need, so driving her son to school one morning she said, “About the gender words thing...”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, wiping at his eye.

“Wait, let me finish. I think you’re going to like what I’m going to say. You have told me you can’t deal with this right now, and I’m accepting that. I’m backing off.”

“Thank you.”

That felt right, but it didn't stop the storm of pain and sadness, which loomed just as black as ever. Elizabeth held herself together in hopes of making it to her next therapy appointment...but at the appointed hour the door did not open. She waited fifteen minutes, then knocked. There had been a scheduling snafu; her therapist was seeing another patient. “I need to see you,” Elizabeth said. Text me later, said the therapist, and Elizabeth stumbled downstairs.

In her parked car she burst into wild sobs. “I want my mother!” she screamed. And, “I deserve to exist in the world! I do! I do! I deserve to exist!”...needing to say it so vehemently because of a terrible fear that it wasn’t true. Her courage and strength had failed her, and she felt as at other times at this same nadir the crushing weight of so many years of existence with self denied, of existence only through the mask of maleness, of shadow-life. She sobbed in her car for nearly an hour, then texted and asked if she could come back in, and her therapist texted back yes.

The session was oddly strained. Even in the midst of blurting out her dilemma Elizabeth sensed her therapist groping for responses...she sensed impatience, annoyance. Her therapist defended the children’s right to process in their own time, and to be parented by Elizabeth even as she struggled with her own pain, and Elizabeth agreed. But what about her own terrible need then? With time running out, the therapist said the words which Elizabeth needed to hear: “You do deserve to exist in the world.”

In a grateful rush: “Yes, thank you...I needed to hear someone say that. Thank you so much.”

“You do. You deserve to exist as Lisa you deserve to exist as Dave...”

“What? I wish you hadn’t said that last part.”

In a vehement note-to-self whisper: “I’m never going to say that name again.”

The last few minutes of the appointment were awkward, and Elizabeth left without making another appointment.

On the way home, bumped out of her rut of self-pity by irritation, Elizabeth formulated a new thought: OK, for the past twenty years I’ve been mising the presence of a mom in my Christmases...so fuck it, I’m gonna be the mom. My children can call me what they like, but what they’re getting is mothering.

She put her thought and heart into selecting presents; she cleaned; she bought herself a mixer and baked enough not only to satisfy her household’s sweet teeth, but to take plates to neighbors too; she wrapped; she played the piano while her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend decorated the tree. In a word, for the first time in her adult life, she committed to the holiday, not as a religious nor a commercial celebration, but as the simple family gathering it had been for her when she was growing up...and the children seemed to have a good Christmas.

And, what about Elizabeth? Well, she survived. The amount of hurt she felt running the seasonal gauntlet was not less than in previous years; but in trying to make a real warm holiday happen in her own home she felt more joy in the day than ever before since her mother’s death, and she figured that counted as a victory.

Three years and counting

December is my darkest month. That was true before any of this gender business surfaced, and it’s still true. I always feel sad in December because my parents are dead and gone, and this year I’ve made a quick hard start to the annual holiday blues.
     
Besides just missing them, I want to show my parents me. I want to say to each of them: all that time, you had a daughter instead of a son, and neither of us knew it. Can you love me? It would have been the hardest question I would ever have had to ask in my whole life, but I still want to ask it. I never get to do that. Never.

A dark phrase recurs in my life: “No love for you.” I find myself saying it when I miss my parents, when I review my tragicomic romantic history, after each rejection on match.com, and when I look in the mirror and fail to imagine a masculine person I could love who might be able to see past the leftover bits of my physical maleness and love me back.

Does this purported possible partner have to be a masculine person? No...but I can’t see how to love another feminine person, because I fear her wanting me to be the masculine one, which is what I did for all those years, to my enduring pain. I don’t know if I can ever go back there. But, on the other hand, why not? Wouldn’t it be better if someone loved and wanted the whole me, including the 45 years of life as a man, which will always be part of who I am?

I. DON’T. KNOW.

I’m fucking confused, because I don’t feel any different. I feel like I felt when everyone in the world including me saw me as a man. So how am I not still a man? Or is self in essence genderless, and gender a cloak we put on when we turn to face the world?

I’m in another patch of wishing this had never happened. Not doubting...there’s no doubt. But I’m fucking sick of it. I want to stop being trans now. I want to not have to work so hard at just presenting myself to the world every day. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKF CUKF CUFKUCKUF CFKUCK UCDFKU CFKU CKLFU CLKFU XCKFU DXKFU XDLFKUS  DLFKSDUFLKLkdf get the idea?

Anyway, guess what? I’ve been self-aware as trans for three years. It was at this dark time of year in 2008 I wrote “I just want to be a girl” in my journal, from which all else has followed. I was going to work up a peppy and clever summing-up post about that, but the above is what came out instead.

There *have* been some positive developments recently. After some bureaucratic hassle I got my new passport the other day, with my new legal name and an “F” for gender. That means I can keep my consultation appointment in a couple of weeks in Montreal, in preparation for SRS this coming summer.

Also, my daughter, home from college for the holiday, told me she has started calling me her mom when she’s talking to people about me. That’s so lovely...but on the other hand, she also still calls me “Daddio.” The “Daddio” issue just sucks. It’s what both my children have always called me, and it is a word full of history and love, so I can hardly blame them for hanging onto it, but every time they say it I feel shoved back into an old bad wrong box, and it makes me wretched.

Here’s my big three-years-and-counting insight: I’m not done yet. With day-to-day living going well and my surgery scheduled, I’ve been feeling like I’ve completed something, or at least arranged for the completion...but really, everything is still in process. Helping my children come to terms, the search for love, hormonal changes, the search for a voice I can stand, electrolysis, the question of whether to get facial surgery (which I’ve been aching for again)... all still incomplete, all still happening.

I’m so fucking tired...but, here I still am, surviving a day at a time, writing, working, persevering...enduring. There is joy. I know, because I remember feeling it. I can’t access it now, but I feel pretty confident that it will be back. Meanwhile, I endure. Happy fucking December.

The Trans Explosion

The article I wrote recently for Out in Maine, the LGBT quarterly supplement to the Portland Phoenix, has been posted on line. In the article I assert that trans really seems to be *happening* right now in crucial ways, and, using local examples in Maine, explore how personal trans narratives are driving this change and vice versa. If I have piqued your interest, you can check it out here...

Out of a flame war, pandemic love

Last night my 19-year old daughter Madeleine posted on facebook some whimsical wordplay based on terms she is trying out to describe her sexuality. She has already claimed “pansexual,” (which I also am coming to prefer for myself), meaning attracted to people based on who they are as people, regardless of biological sex or gender; and she’s trying out the word “demisexual”, meaning not tending to feel sexual attraction except to a person with whom one has first become emotionally intimate (which I also like for myself...I hope you don’t mind, dearest, that I’m co-opting your words). “Demisexual” is a new-minted word, courtesy of the asexuality movement, for an old-fashioned idea: sex as an adjunct to, an extension and expression of, love. So Mad’s line was that she’s a “pandemic romantic,” which, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s funny.

A few of her friends posted light-hearted comments, and then one particular friend, whom I will call X, posted this: “‘Pansexual’ is an orientation. ‘Demisexual’ is not. Neither is ‘romantic’. Just sayin'.”

An escalation ensued. Points got misunderstood, feelings got hurt, and what could have been a substantive conversation about the complexities of identity quickly turned personal. An hour and 40-some posts later, several people had posted things they are probably regretting today (if they’re done fuming), my daughter had defriended X, and various friends both in cyber and real space were giving her hugs in commiseration for having been the unwitting trigger of, and scorched figure at the center of, a doozy of a flame war.

This incident has helped me crystallize some thoughts about sex, gender, and queer identity. First of all, I respectfully disagree with X. Demisexuality and being a romantic *are* both orientations. In fact, in a way, they are more radical orientations than the L, G, and B of LGBT, because, just as pansexuality challenges the unquestioned assumption behind these letters that gender matters, they challenge the unquestioned assumption that sex matters. They are a “none of the above” option. They say: “If I, whoever I turn out to be, should happen to want to go to bed with my sweetie, whoever my sweetie turns out to be, it will be because I love my sweetie and my sweetie loves me. Love is different from sex and knows no gender, and love is what matters most to me.”

I am *not* saying that LGB folk don’t understand or care about love. Completely not. But queer culture does seem to me to be as obsessed with sex as our culture as a whole is. I don’t really have a problem with that, though as a person who cares less about sex than love it makes me feel marginalized at both cultural levels. And I could hardly blame people fighting for equality for their sexual identities if they felt threatened by the idea that sex doesn’t matter. I do have a problem, though, when it becomes politically incorrect to speak of non-sexual or only-incidentally-sexual love.

And, I *am* saying that the emphasis on traditional concepts of gender inherent in the definitions of L, G, and B sometimes feels inimical to the interests of us T folk. My dear LGB friends: I thank you most fervently for the enormous amount of help and support you have given me in my gender work, both individually and, by fighting a version of the same fight first, on a global scale. I have learned and benefited from your struggle. I stand shoulder to shoulder with you against the forces of prejudice and hate which so seldom distinguish between us. And, I enjoy your company, feel at ease with you, and am so grateful to have been welcomed in under the big LGBT umbrella. But, alas, all that said, I do also sometimes see you as part of the gender hegemony against which, all my life, I have struggled. I will never self-identify as gay, lesbian, bi, hetero or homo, because all of this terminology fails to challenge and continues to perpetrate the bad old binary concept of gender. Until I come up with something I like better, I am a pandemisexual romantic trans woman.

May I invite you to join me and Mad in seeking new ways of talking about ourselves and each other which celebrate the diversity, complexity, and subtlety of gender as thoroughly as we have celebrated the diversity, complexity, and subtlety of sexuality? And could we all, please, get at least part of the way back to the charming old-fashioned notion of speaking reverently of love?

Got my surgery date

There’s a notation in my planner book now, on the monthly spread for next June, in the box for Wednesday the 27th: “SRS.” In 263 days Drs. Brassard and Bélanger in Montréal will fashion, from my present redundancies, sophisticated simulacra of a vagina and clitoris.

It has been harder coming to this decision than I thought it would be. I don’t mean fear of the knife, or anxiety about money, though I’m experiencing both. I mean emotionally. Both the need I feel to do this and the loss it turns out to entail rise out of deeper places in the psyche than I was expecting.

Need. I feel like I’m over-dramatizing when I say it, but it’s true: I can’t stand to look at myself naked in the mirror any more. I either keep my panties on, or cover with a hand. It's hard to pin down the right word for how I feel now about the original accouterments. Hate is not quite right. Disgust? No, that’s not quite right either. I don’t repulse myself. Outrage? Yes, that’s closer. Fresh, each time. What, still!? No! Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong! Those have GOT to go!

Another thing: I can’t conceive of being naked with another person until I get this done. I don’t want anyone to see me, and I don’t want anyone to want me for a thing from which I feel so estranged. Until my body is closer to right, the only choice which feels safe is to hold myself apart from all others. But oh, I am so fucking lonely. I have run up a 40 years’ deficit of loving and being loved as a feminine being, and I am eons beyond sick of it. Words fail. Just...fuck.

And, loss. With every big transition step - revelation, coming out, starting hormones, name change, going full time - I find myself grieving all over again for all time I have lost, and also battling through another round of anger at the random unfairness of it all. I am so weary of “If only...” and “Why me?”, but I don’t seem able to avoid them. And don’t forget, “I want my Mommy!” At each step I also seem to have to grieve all over again for my parents. Part of it is that I ache to show them who I really am...but mostly, in the defenseless way of a hurting child, I just want them, want their love. Again: fuck.

One sort of bright spot: going through this wringer so often, I'm getting better at it. I'm becoming an emotional-processing virtuosa. Tra la, hooray for me.

Then there is the loss my transition is inflicting on my children...which, after numerous attempts, I find I cannot write about right now. What I can say: That I love them, and that I always will. That I will never stop doing my best to parent them. That I’m sorry. That I’m so incredibly proud of them. That they are my life’s greatest joy.

As usual, I have questioned, challenged, second-guessed my resolve; and as usual, the proof is in action. I’ve held steadily to my purpose through all the steps so far. I’ve done my research and chosen my surgeons. I’ve paid professionals to certify that I am in my right mind. I’ve figured out how to take the money out of my retirement account. (Another truly bright spot: it appears I will avoid the penalty for early withdrawal because I’ll have allowable medical expenses exceeding 7.5% of my income in the same year...a savings of a couple thousand.) And, I’ve made a first withdrawal for a down payment. Still to come: getting a passport, arranging to exit my life for three weeks, estate planning just in case, a battery of pre-surgery tests...waiting...and then, a ride from a friend.

I’ll still be able to change my mind up until the moment the anaesthesiologist comes to sedate me. Who knows, I might; but I don’t think so.

The candle-count puzzle

Here's an intriguing question: how old am I?

Five! I’m five! See my fingers? Count them! One two three four five! Five!

That’s good, honey, but I need you to hush for a second so I can write this, OK?

(Pouts.)

OK, that’s one answer. There’s a part of me that seems to have frozen in childhood - my innermost passionate vulnerable girl-self - and at this point I don’t know if she’s ever going to change. Which is fine. I love her, and after all she is me...but it’s more complicated than that.

Transition for me has followed the course of a hyper-accelerated second life, starting with my gender revelation in November ‘08, which, with its sense of dawning glory, did feel like being born. Then for several months, while responsible adult male self trudged on through his regular days, I explored with trepidation and trembling joy what it meant to be alive...

Guess what, I’m five!

Shh, sweetheart...let me finish. C’mere so I can hold you. Better? OK, good.

As I was saying, in those early secret days every step felt huge, every risk drastic. My e-mail updates to my few long-distance confidants have the breathless “lookitme lookitme!” tone of a girl riding a bike by herself for the first time. For a little while, I did truly feel...honey?

Five?

That’s right, very good. And six and seven and eight, calendar pages flipping by...

Then came adolescence. During this stretch I became even more self-involved than usual, felt emotionally needy most of the time, and experienced a real sense of resentment about my responsibilities in life. In sum, I reminded myself (forgive me, my dears) of my own teenagers on their worst days.

That stage feels done now too, thank goodness, and these days I think of myself as being in my twenties. Elements of this phase include a (re-)growing awareness of the world and my potential role in it, a strengthening of the impulse to self-expression, a tendency to vehement opinion, a greater willingness and ability to bear my responsibilities with fortitude, and a feeling of readiness to love and be loved.

So, two and a half years post-revelation, I feel 25 or so. That comes out to ten trans-years for each year of real time; and that maps well onto what I’ve heard about other transitioning people’s complete arcs, that they feel pretty much done after four or five years. So maybe in another two and half years the age I feel and the age I actually am will match up again, and then I can just get on with the rest of my life.

What’s that? 49? Pff...that’s just the number of years I have been alive. Doesn't matter hardly at all.

Up side update

A friend e-mailed me the other day to ask if I was OK. She was feeling motherly concern based on a couple of my recent blog posts (this one and this one), which, reading  back, I can understand. I was doing hard emotional work when I wrote both of them, and they are dark. I don’t want to minimize those posts; but on the other hand, I’m doing fine overall, and it occurs to me that if I want this blog to reflect my total transition experience, then I’m overdue for an up side update. As a matter of fact, many parts of transition are going well.

Parenting: Transition is a narcissistic process, and from time to time I have become so engrossed in myself that my parenting has faltered. Most recently this took the form of pointing both my emotional neediness and my stress about money at my children in ways which were unfair to them. In effect I was asking them for the kind of support one might expect from an adult friend or partner rather than from one’s teenagers. Sensible and empowered as they are (I do have amazing offspring) they called me on it. At their request we went together to a short course of family therapy, and talked a bunch of stuff out. End results: I’m feeling better and stronger about my parenting than I have for a long time (and, I trust, doing a better job at it); I also got to say some things I think they needed to hear; and in our little household the tension-level has gone way down and the fun-level has gone way up. Yay for all three of us! :-)

Hormones: It has been about a year now since I got up to full doses in my hormone regimen, and I am totally digging the physical changes. I’m already happy with my new breasts; even if they don’t grow any more than the modest amount they have so far, I have indefinitely tabled the idea of surgical enhancement. My face also looks much more feminine, mostly perhaps because I’ve lost about twenty pounds, but there could be skin changes and fat-distribution changes too. (Likewise with my neck, shoulders, arms, legs.) Some days at least I think maybe I’ll never have to get facial surgery, and considering how desperate the need for that has sometimes felt, that’s big. I can’t quite say I’ve tabled it indefinitely, but at least for a couple of years I have, and that eases the money worry. And, one other hormone plus: back hair completely gone. That makes me smile every time I think of it. :-)

Surgery plans: I have pretty much settled on a surgeon and a date for Sexual Reassignment Surgery (Dr. Brassard in Montreal, summer of 2012), and have a working plan for how to pay for it (retirement savings, which I recently discovered I have more of than I thought). The Montreal SRS experience sounds about as wonderful as it could be: Dr. B is by all accounts as good as any other SRS surgeon working, and for a day before and several days after your procedure you stay in a residence with other patients, nursing care, full meals...and all for the same price as other surgeons who send you off on your own after a couple days in the hospital. One of the things I was dreading most about SRS was a week spent recovering in some anonymous hotel room, which seems to be the dominant model here in the States. A week of pampering and peer support for no extra dollars? Yes please!

Performance/writing: As noted in previous posts, I recently realized a lifelong ambition and performed a piece in a show. (Gushy post here.)  I want to see what it’s like to perform for a straight audience next, rather than a room full of twenty-something lesbians, so I’m going to check out the comedy open mic at the Slainte winebar here in Portland. One visit to get the vibe, and then work up a routine and step up to the mic. Oooh, butterflies. I’ve got the bug bad...performing is *such* a rush, and I turn out not to suck at it, so, onward.

Meanwhile, after several false starts, I have figured out a way to write long-form about my trans experience. Success as a writer is my earliest, most intense, and most enduring ambition in life, so when a project is going well I feel a deep sense of fulfilment and happiness which nothing else can give me. It’s going slowly, but it’s going...joy!

Feminine life: the daily experience of living as woman in the world has lost the gee-whiz factor which leads to blog posts, but it continues to be deeply satisfying. I’m not sure how, but I’ve managed to reduce my anxiety about presentation (dress, carriage, mannerisms, and especially voice) almost to zero and just focus on enjoying every moment. I still get such pleasure from such simple things; a nice new pair of earrings, walking down Congress Street in a skirt, an unforced and natural “ma’am” at the grocery store.

So, in sum, yeah, I have money troubles, and sometimes my self-esteem plummets, and sometimes I feel desperately lonely, and I have no idea at this point even what sort of partner I want, let alone might ever find...but overall things are going well. The curious burden of being trans is also the source of most of the pleasure and sense of forward motion in my life, and it is *never* boring.

Next time the rollercoaster dips down into one of those low tunnels, remind me to come back and re-read this post.

Still more new rightness

Two and a half years into her transition, Elizabeth gradually became aware of a feeling of natural ease in self which she had never experienced before in her life, unless it was in the first few years, as a tiny child...but that was beyond memory. Time rolled on, as ever, but somehow now there was room which had never been there before; room to breathe before speaking, to feel before acting.

For all the long man-impersonation time, she now understood, she had acted on peremptory impulse out of a defining sense of anxiety. What would a man do now? I must do it instantly! Life had been speech before thought, action before centeredness.

It was ironic that for the past nine years she had been telling hundreds of radio trainees to breathe. But then, who needs the teacher’s lesson more than the teacher herself? And how could so many cis-gendered people still seem so unhappy, if they had always felt this natural and free? But then, one who has found peace through seemingly endless struggle will naturally treasure that peace more than those who have always known it.

The new rightness threaded through every part of her life. At work, in conversation with needy or vulnerable volunteers, she found herself more able to pause and then respond in a way which might help. At home she experienced a new, specifically maternal sense of tenderness and pleasure in the raising of her still-growing teens. In performance on the stages of life generally she found herself capable of a deeper level of self-trust in the moment than ever before. Thus aspects of her true personality began to show forth more clearly: a fundamental impulse to nurture; flashes of extroversion, sauciness, and flamboyance; a recasting of the old man-steel strength in whip-thin willow.

Of course she still sometimes said and did things she regretted, but less than ever before. The joy of her long unclenching ebbed and surged, but over time it continued to well up inexorably, engendering ever new and deeper senses of rightness.

The Hearing and the Beating

On April 12th I attended a Judiciary Committee hearing in Augusta on a bill (LD 1046) which would make an exception for trans people in Maine’s Human Rights Act, so that forcing a trans person to use the bathroom or locker room matching her/his physical sex at birth would not count as discrimination. I went to add my voice to the chorus of “against” voices; and I came away with puzzles to figure out about prejudice. Please forgive the long post, but I’ve travelled down a long chain of thought and feeling since the hearing, and I want to try to get it all down.

The hearing went well for us opponents, I think. Equality Maine did a great job of organizing, so we had all been briefed on how to be courteous to the Committee, how to field questions from reporters, and when it would be our turn to have our three-minute say; and the supporters soon ran out of speakers, so then it was just a long string of trans-positive testimony. Many non-trans allies spoke, which was lovely; the most moving for me was the father of a young trans girl who wept talking about the ordeals his family has endured trying to find safe schooling for his daughter. And the trans among us accomplished as much, I think, by showing ourselves to the Committee as by speaking. Look at me, each of us said, just by standing there: I am trans, and I am intelligent and well-spoken, and I dress in ordinary clothes and act in ordinary ways, and I clearly have feelings just like everyone, and, in short, I am an ordinary human being, just like you.

This was a crucial point to make...because behind the testimony of the supporters of the bill lurked the pernicious and utterly false phantom image of the trans person, especially the trans woman, as sexual predator and pedophile.