GenderBendy

Sistah, get up here!

Last Thursday, May 30th, was a momentous down-and-up day for me. I was in San Francisco at the annual conference put on by the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. In the morning I learned that I had not gotten a station manager job for which I had been a finalist. The rejection stung, because I thought I was particularly well suited for the job, and had given the candidacy my all. I didn’t have much time to brood about it, though, because in the evening I went to a Moth Story Slam on the theme of neighborhoods, told the story of coming out to my neighbors, and won the slam.

Another part of my California trip was getting together with Larry, whom I hadn’t seen since college. He’s a professional jazz pianist, and when I timorously asked him if he would let me try singing with him he said yes, and then after the first song he said, “let’s do another.” And another, and another, and at the end he didn’t say I was the next Carmen McRae, but he didn’t say I sucked either. He said I hadn’t done too badly for the first time. As horribly self-conscious and unsure about my voice as I have been since transitioning, the implication that he thought there could be a next time made me feel wonderful. Thanks Larry, you’re such a sweetheart. :-)

So in the same few days I received a couple of powerful affirmations of my voice (variously defined), and a couple of de-affirmations of my hireability as a community radio station manager - the natural next step for me if I'm going to stay in the biz. (Besides the job I didn’t get, there was also a conversation with the outgoing holder of another juicy position in which she gently discouraged me from applying.) As a result of these developments, after nearly three decades working in non-commercial radio I find myself wondering if there is still a career arc for me in that world any more.

I was naive about prejudice before I transitioned. I thought it was always clear-cut and obvious. It’s not. It’s insidious and veiled. In this case I can all too easily imagine even such dedicated liberals as the folks who were considering my application reassuring themselves that they had no problem with my transness themselves, but still fretting about how, for example, potential funders might be reluctant to give money to a station I was running because a trans woman was the one asking, and so finding some plausible reason not to hire me.

Of course I’ll never know for sure if such prejudice by proxy was in play. Maybe it was plain straight-ahead prejudice. Maybe on the other hand I just wasn't good enough for the job. Maybe it doesn't matter. Here's what I know: if after a lifetime of work in my chosen field it turns out that I can’t move ahead, maybe it’s time to go into another field. Suddenly it seems more important to finish the novel I wrote the draft of last November during NaNoWriMo. Likewise to get back into the comedy work; likewise to find some place local to do some more singing; likewise to really engage with the idea of putting together a one-woman show.

High risk ventures? Yep. Long odds of success? Uh-huh. Buffeted by fluctuating confidence, scared of failure? You bet. Might still have to just go for it, though. What the hell else am I going to do? Money worries press ever harder, other avenues seem closed, and there are only so many hours in a day, so much energy left in the body. Life surely does seem to want to boot me out into the spotlight.

Doing standup again

Before last night I had done two standup comedy sets in my life, both in late 2011. I killed at the Femme Show in front of an audience of twenty-something queers, and then a few weeks later bombed at the straight peoples' open mike at Slainte. After that debacle it has taken me until now to get my nerve back up to try again, but last night at Mama's Crow Bar on Congress, at their regular Sunday open mike, I did a 9-minute set and got some solid laughs and some nice compliments from other comics after. There were only about 18 people in the room, but still.

I recorded it and am pretty pleased overall. The PA was turned down lower than I wanted and when I have to project my voice drops, so I don't like how masculine I sounded, and the final story needs to be tightened, but mostly the material worked. I started and ended with non-trans humor, because I never want to be just about that, and the main idea of the trans-themed part was seeing if I could figure out how to let the audience know that it was OK to laugh. That worked too.

The best part, though, was that for the first time I got at least a taste of the comfort on stage I've been trying to find since I started dreaming about doing this. Yeah, I'm an introvert, but it turns out I love performing. I'll be going back, because it was a total rush.  :-)

 

The audio

 

Almost had a date

[NOTE: I've rewritten this several times, paring down the self-pity each time until now there's none left. Yay for me. :-)]

A month or so back I dropped in on my OKCupid profile after months away, and while I was there a text box popped up. “Walt” wanted to chat. He had sent me a message some time before but it looked generic, so I hadn’t answered. I felt flattered that he was interested enough to try again, and we had a pleasant text-exchange. Further chats and messages followed.

Walt seemed nice - engaging, funny, full of compliments. There was this thing where if he didn’t want to answer a question he just ignored it, but whatever. He wanted to meet. We arranged drinks at the Great Lost Bear. The day of, he postponed. We were communicating about a second try, and then all of a sudden I stopped hearing from him.

The cutoff came after I left him a voice mail message for the first time, and I still often sound male to people on the phone, so was that why? Anyway, I spent a few days compulsively checking my messages, then weathered a day of feeling worthless and unloveable, and then it was past.

I never outright asked Walt if he understood that I’m trans, but I figured he knew because he said he had read my whole profile. Also it turned out he had just finished working at USM, so it seemed unlikely he had missed my recent public transition. Plus he said he had seen me a few times and liked what he saw.

The more I think about love, the less it seems to me to have anything to do with gender. I’m looking for a sympatico someone who might be interested in a mutual opening-toward. There’s no gender in that. As for bodies, well, what matters most to me is cuddling, and everybody has warm skin. Beyond that, if my someone wants sex, I have hardly any libido myself, but I’m comfy in my own body finally, and willing to go along with whatever.

That theory espoused, I will admit to ongoing curiousity about the possibility of a male-bodied lover. I mean, it would be a shame to never try out the new parts, right? Evidently, though, I'm not open to something casual, so...hm. Lisa the enigmasexual.

Hey Walt, no hard feelings, but you could at least have sent a last “Sorry not interested after all” message, y’know? You had me hoping, and then you left me hanging.

I never even met the guy face to face. Fucking impulsive overeager puppydog heart. No restraint whatsoever.

Summer idyll

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Two weeks since surgery, fifth day home, and I inhabit a profound placidity new to my experience. I feel languorous, fundamentally undriven, deeply calm. Post-surgery energy deficit? The (at last) natural plunging of my testosterone level to near zero? The end of decades of the unrelenting tension of projecting masculinity into the world? Perhaps all three. And of course it is summer and I am home alone, drifting through silent recuperative days. For the first time in my life, in a way, I am at rest. How odd.

When and how and why will I move again? I'm not sure. I feel that I am waiting to see who I am; from that will follow what I will do...when I feel a little stronger again.

* * *

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

I am not yet friends with my new parts. They still feel variously numb, itchy, prickly, tender and sore. They are still bruised and swollen, and still full of stitches, some of which will take up to two months to disolve. Also, my labia minora still look like an untreated wound. It's gory in there. Ew. I sent a couple of anxious phone-pictures to the clinic the other day and got back a reassuring e-mail: looks normal, you're healing on schedule; keep yourself very clean, keep dilating four times a day, and be patient.

OK. OK, I can do that. But I'll tell you what: I am *working* for this. Whatever good comes of it will be hard-won and well-earned. Fuck yeah.

There is one astonishing thing so far about my new parts: the endlessly renewable marvel of standing and looking at myself naked in the mirror. No more need to cover up. The man parts are gone! In their place, an incomprehensible miracle: the gentle bifurcated pubic swell, curving back and away. Every time I look, still, my brows contract in the middle. Really? I mean, *really*? It can't be. But it is...look again. *Really*? Better look again... Fifty years is a long time - it is going to take a while longer to believe this is true.

Then there is the joy of being testicle-free. No more testosterone! I did not fully realize, before, how much I was stoically enduring on account of that potent molecule. I have experienced, post-surgery, a sudden advance in the feminization of my whole body. My muscles have lost mass and gotten softer. My skin feels softer too. The body hair I shaved off right before surgery is growing back so fine as to be in most places effectively invisible. My little A-cup cuties have gotten noticeably fuller. Yes, yes, yes, to all these lovely changes.

Yesterday, looking at myself at various angles in two mirrors, I saw myself more completely as a woman than ever before: a tall, big-boned, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, thin-haired quirky-faced woman, but a woman nonetheless, and honey, not half-bad looking either. Chances of further surgery are diminishing...maybe just hairline and Adam's apple, my two most significantly masculine facial features, and no particular rush. I may not need even that, because I feel my femininity shining out of me more strongly all the time. It is in the limber grace my body continues to discover; it is in the way I can feel the animation of my face more fully reflecting the quicksilver dapple of my mood and mind; it is in the new softer music my voice has of late been finding. As I continue to open to the light, how can I fail to express "woman" more and more fully? I *am* a woman, and at last I am free to be. My joyful flowering continues. :-)

 

Countdown, contra, pool hall encounter

So I’ve gotten all fancy with my entries and have forgotten to simply document. Here are some things which have been happening.

Surgery countdown continues. It’s 56 days away as of this typing - June 27th. As you can see, I am counting the days. I’m eager and scared and determined and curious, all at once. There has been a long wrangle about how to pay for it without impacting my children’s college funding, but I think I’ve figured that out. I’m getting pre-surgery tests soon, and arranging for various kinds of assistance I’ll need before, during, and after - a ride up, a ride back, a ride back to the airport for one of my rides. It’s complicated, but just the sort of detailed planning I’m good at. I’ll be taking five or six weeks off from work...and then life will go on.

I can’t imagine the outcome. I mean, really, I can’t. I move forward based on my fervent desire to get rid of the present accoutrements. It is enduringly unpleasant to feel estranged from parts of your own body.

I went contra dancing a few weeks ago, my first time approaching this particular gendered activity from the female side. I was anxious and it was hot, so after the first dance I began to sweat. The hormones have made it so that I don’t stink the way I used to, but still, it was embarrassing - my bangs plastered to my forehead. In the ladies’ room I poked at them in the mirror, and, forgetting myself for a moment, made a vexed remark in more or less my old male voice. A woman just coming out of a stall gave me a second look, but then went on her way. Aside from that moment, I didn’t see any of the double-takes or knitted brows or eyebrow-jumps or face-freezes I have learned to recognize as being read.

It was fun taking hands and being swung and spun by all those different men. It wasn’t sexual at all, but it was physical and gendered all the same. One guy lifted up my arm to spin me and I spun him instead. “Sorry,” he said, looking confused. Next time I go, I’ll work on letting go into following more. And I’ll dress less warmly. This time around I couldn’t resist wearing my new long-sleeve dress, to feel as femme as possible.

The other vignette I've been saving to narrate is an encounter with a man, a stranger. This was at Racks, a tavern on St. John St. in Portland, where I have started stopping some evenings on my way home from work to play pool. I had a table to myself and had worked my way through a couple games of 8-ball, playing both sides, when a male voice spoke behind me, asking if I was alone. I turned and looked. He was maybe 56 or so, tall and large-chested, tan, with coiffed white hair. He wore a sweatshirt and shorts, showing off muscular calves. His face was open and his eyes intent. He was shooting pool alone too - would I like to play? I said yes. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. The question of which of us would give up our table hung in the air. “It’s fine,” I said, not realizing until later what an eyeroller of a line it was. “I’ll turn in my balls.”

Bruce and I played two games before I had to leave to pick up the boy. He watched me in a steady searching way and complimented my better shots. He was a good player - not smashing the balls, as so many male players do, but finessing his leaves. He won both games, though we got down to the lone eight in the second. I liked his soft-spokeness and seeming gentleness. I also liked that he played for real. He didn't ease up or condescend.

Did I find him attractive? Yes. Was I in a tizzy? Only a little, and mostly because I hadn’t shaved since morning, so in strong light what remains as yet un-electrologized of my stubble would have been visible to him. I was also self-conscious about my voice, but then I'm always self-conscious about my voice. Overall I felt cautiously at ease. I’ve learned that once people have read you as one gender or the other, they tend to stick with that read. (One time last year after an hour-long workshop at a conference which I conducted in pretty much my old male vocal tones, a woman participant told me she loved my voice. “It’s so deep - you sound like Lauren Bacall.”)

Mostly I wasn’t in a tizzy because my experience from dating sites is that even decent kind thoughtful men are generally not interested once they know I’m trans, so I don’t get my hopes up. I work on the assumption that when it comes time to have that conversation (and I lean toward having it early in an acquaintance), that will be the end of any possible romance. Of course, it will take only one good man to prove I’m wrong about that, so I do hope a little. Not that it’s guaranteed that I’ll end up with a male partner, but I am definitely interested and curious.

After he sank the eight the second time I said I had to go and we shook hands. I said maybe I'd see him there again sometime, and he said he was from out of town, travelling, and only visited a few times a year. He leaned a little forward as he said this and let a silence open out and I sensed an opening, an opportunity to offer companionship. I would not have taken it even if I could - I had had enough novelty for one night. We shook hands again. There was the awkwardness which bespeaks mutual attraction. As my daughter would say, herp derp.

I was at Racks again earlier tonight and wondered if maybe he had left me a message at the bar, but apparently not. Bruce, I doubt we’ll ever meet again, but thank you for making me feel attractive and womanly. I liked you.

Other things have been going on - some expensive rejected insurance claims for hormone testing, which I’m trying to get covered, and some fruitful counseling with my son - but I don’t feel like writing about them at length right now. Maybe some other time. A sporadic irrational sense of doom aside, things are going pretty well. Half the days or maybe even more, I feel at least somewhat optimistic. Not bad.

 

Susan Swartz Bunker, 10/7/33 - 4/8/92

Dear Sue,

How can it be twenty years since I sat by your hospital bed, stunned by the calamity of your aneurysm? “It couldn’t be much worse,” the neurologist said bluntly, and the nurse had to keep clearing your breathing tube after you coughed...they said on top of whatever else the flood of blood in your brain was putting you through, you were also giving up smoking. They said if you lived on in the coma your tendons would shorten, so Susie went out and bought a pair of black high-top sneakers to keep your ankles bent.

You did not live. You died without regaining consciousness, though there was that moment when I asked if you could squeeze my hand and you did, just one little twitch. “Oh, yes, I’m here, I love you!” I cried in a rush, squeezing convulsively back. It was our last communication. The memory of it still brings me to tears.

I wish you were still alive. I want to introduce you to your grandchildren. It still rips my heart apart that you died just before Mad was born, though it is a consolation that you at least got to know she was on the way. I still smile when I remember telling you on the phone we were thinking of “Cosmo” for a boy. “No,” you said, and I loved the flat presumption to veto in your voice. For all your tight-lipped silences over the years, or perhaps because of them, when you spoke you could imbue your opinions with the force of moral certainty.

Oh my dear mother, what would you have made of me? It would have been terrifying, telling you I am trans. Would you have denied it outright, the way you did our whimsical baby-name choice? I imagine you might have; but this time, I would have had to insist.

Would you have been angry? Would you have disbelieved me? Would you have shut me out for a time? Perhaps all of these reactions...but I can’t imagine you would have shut me out forever.

And what might you have been able to tell me about other denials long ago? I can’t remember if I stifled myself, or if you stifled me, or a combination of the two, but if it was you, I bet you didn’t realize what you were doing. If I ever asked you timidly if I could, say, try your lipstick, I bet you never guessed I was telling you who I was; nor that when you said no, it was another turn of the key in the lock of my secret gender prison.

I remember you as an emotionally elusive woman, and I feared your anger, but I also remember your sly sauciness and your laugh. I remember how when I was small you used to rub my back to soothe my distresses. I remember your tender acceptance when I was soft, emotional. I remember songs you taught me. I remember cutting your hair for you, one straight slice across with the sewing scissors after you clipped it back. I remember how one Christmas evening when I was sitting by the woodstove absorbed in a gift-book, you brought me a plate of little sandwiches made of leftover turkey with mustard on crusty bread. I remember, after I brought hugging home from college, feeling your bird-bone shoulders under my hands when we hugged. 

One thing I can’t remember is your voice. I wonder if the voice I’m searching for sounds something like yours. I do find, as I settle into my natural womanhood, that I look somewhat like you, and that I use words and phrases and gestures you used to use. I take after you, it seems.

I can’t imagine you would have shut me out forever, so I must imagine that at some point you would have accepted me, called me by my name, used “she” and “her”...called me your daughter. What a gift that would have been: a second giving of life. In your absence I have had to birth myself this time, and it has gone fine, but I grieve that I will never get to show you who I really am. I just have to live with that.

Mother dearest, I was a girl the whole time, and I am a woman now, and I miss you, and I love you.

Your daughter,

Lisa

 

Maine's Transgender Revolution video

I'm turning 50 next Tuesday. If I figure out what that means, you can be sure I'll post about it. ;-)

In the meantime, video is now available online of a panel discussion I recently helped put together about the past, present, and future of the trans experience in Maine. The panel was presented by the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine on March 21st, 2012, on the USM Portland campus, and it went really well. My fellow panelists - Margaret Cook, Jamie-Lynn Emma Kane, and Alex Roan - were all excellent, sharing personal stories and general insights in a wide-ranging conversation which was variously funny, touching, profound, and inspirational. We also had some wonderful input from the audience.

Links:  Part One  Part Two

Brief personal viewing notes: I hate my voice still. I have *got* to do something about that. But, I thought I rocked the dress pretty well...panel day turned out to be the first really warm day of spring I anticipated in this post.

Anyway, if you decide to check any of the video out, happy viewing! :-)

Three years and a day and counting

I recorded the following audio file on my hand-held flash recorder during my commute the morning after posting the last post. It's a rebuttal of sorts, or a next step which, in retrospect, I was still working on when I wrote that last post. 

3 years and a day

 Since I made this recording it has further occurred to me that "please yourself" can mean both "strive to reach your own standards," and simply "try to get what you really want," and I have been experiencing a curious new sense of freedom from worry about what other people think and expect of me. Perhaps a major step...the changing of a lifelong mental habit of existing in a perpetual state of anxiety to please others...hmm, we'll see.

 

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.

%&@# voice

 I continue to struggle with voice. I'm not even close to where I want to be, I don't feel like I'm making any progress, and I'm frustrated and afraid that I'm never going to be able to figure this out. In internet audio files I have heard stunning results...natural, warm, expressive, *beautiful* female voices. I underestand the techniques, but I just can't seem to do it. I'm still all scratchy and creaky and falsetto-y. I still sound to my own ears like a man. Worse: like a man hurting himself to no useful end. Fuck.

I think I'm going to have to break down and seek professional voice coaching. What will it cost? Money and pride. Ha.

In the meantime, I thought it would be different and instructive to post some audio. Earlier this year I bought a little handheld digital recorder which I keep in my car so I can practice while I commute. I recorded the following yesterday while driving on the Maine Turnpike. As you will hear, it's the second of two takes. It runs a bit over seven minutes and turned out to be as good a summary of where I am now in the transition process as I could have produced had a sat down to write it.

Voice 11/11/11

 [note added 3 days later: the above explanatory text came out of feeling frustrated and needing to vent; the voice issue is both less fraught and more complicated than that. Less fraught: day to day I'm comfy most of the time regardless of how my voice sounds as long as I am accepted and treated as a woman, which I mostly am these days, at least face to face - telephone conversations are still  challenging. More complicated: the central reason, I think, I'm having trouble developing the voice I want is that I'm conflicted about what voice I want: a startlingly natural woman's voice, or a defiantly odd I'm-trans-and-I'm-proud voice. At least I don't feel compelled to press the matter. Mostly I feel content to just be and speak and change as I need to change. This involves some squirming, but it's healthy, I think.]