TransLate

I’m thinking of my parents a lot these days.

I know my transition is conflated with my grief over their deaths a few years ago, but it’s complicated in so many ways I don’t know how to untangle the threads.

I want to tell them I’m sorry for being such a shitty adolescent, haughty, argumentative, and contrary.

I want to ask them their advice about my own children, relationships, investments, and other life’s choices.

I want to see them again and show them that everything turned out all right, that my tears at their windy hillside gravesite about what I was about to do a few years ago have dried up and that they shouldn’t worry about me.

I guess I want them to accept the new me and to hear my story, to marvel over how well I’ve turned out, to sit down over lunch and talk.

Maybe I want them to tape my school artwork on the ice-box.

I don’t know what I want. I just miss them.

In a lot of ways, I have grown up to be my mother. Would she approve? Would she understand? Would my father feel disappointment at having his son grow up to be a woman? Would the reunion be characterized by hate, fear, confusion, arguing, and distance?

It’s all academic. They’re gone and nothing’s gonna bring them back.

I try to answer Bon Jovi’s question, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” It depends on what you mean by “home,” doesn’t it?

First, of course you can go home any time you want — if home is a place and hasn’t been demolished, it’s easy to return and walk the streets again.

Second, your old home is like a momentary ripple in the stream of life and while you may return to the stream later in life, that eddy, those water molecules, that day when you dipped your toe into the water — it’s long gone and will never return. If you’re lucky, you may experience the stream with similar feeling as you did previously, but there are no guarantees.

Third, if you consider home to be your past, then you might as well yearn for time travel because if you go back and try to re-live your experiences, you’ll end up the pathetic character who sings Springsteen’s “Glory Days.”

This final idea urges me to quit missing my parents, or at least quit wishing to speak with them. But just how do I do that? As I grow up and change, I need find some way to make peace with my pasts without being constrained by them.

I got a bunch (75+) of fatty lumps (lipomas) removed last Thursday from my arms, legs, and torso, and it was done under general anesthesia. Some were small, but most were large, like flattened golf balls, and the result is that I’m very tender, especially around the waist.

What does this have to do with wardrobe?

Everything, because I simply cannot tolerate anything with a belt or a tight waist, probably for a couple of weeks. So when I talked this over with Mary Jo, she said, “One word: jumpers!” and proceeded to pull a variety of the garb out of our closet. My first impression, once I was wearing a long sleeve sweater to cover my arm-bandages, and once I had draped the jumper over my frame, was that I had suddenly become an elementary school teacher or maybe a granola-crunching NPR reporter.

My carefully-cultivated classic Ann Taylor look notwithstanding, I ventured out into the world with an oatmeal-colored sweater and dark green jumper, accompanied with low-heeled boots. Fashionable? I think that’s debatable. Comfortable? Absolutely, and that’s something that began growing on me within hours of interacting with people. “This is a look I could actually live with,” I found myself saying, “Maybe not all the time, but it’s fast and comfortable and not nearly the embarrassment I expected it to be.” Chalk it up to a severely limited repertoire of clothing images I hold in my imagination.

So for the next week, it’s jumpers and loose skirts whose tops can be worn either above or below my sensitive waist, mostly for the comfort, but partly for the experience of broadening the number of Joyce-performances there might be in the future.

In writing about coming out to family, it’s easy to forget that it’s not all about me, that I have a partner who also has a family. For a variety of reasons, Mary Jo decided not to tell her family about my transition last year. Her father was deeply ill last spring, and died at the end of the spring, when we were coming out to everyone in a juggernaut of disclosures, and she didn’t want to burden her family with her own dramatic news. Her brother Lawrence and his family are moderately close, but not intimate with Mary Jo, and they run in completely different circles, and I think she felt it would be an extra layer of complexity that we didn’t need at the time. In any event, whether or not to come out to her family was a decision that lay in her hands all along.

And it worked for a time. But the more I settled into being Joyce and the more the walls of anonymity and pseudonymity I had built between my various electronic communities began to blur, it became harder to remember whether person X might know or whether we had told person Y. Like a lie, it became difficult to remember which story we had told different of her family members. When I answered the phone and it was Mary Jo’s mother, there were inevitably pauses and the question, “Who is this?” and I either had to quickly revert to George mode or say “Joyce,” and leave that name hanging as a stranger in the house while I called for Mary Jo to pick up the phone. Mary Jo’s niece Katherine had noticed odd things with Mary Jo’s “relationship” status in Facebook, and had asked her parents what was up.

Not wanting to say, “Oh, it’s a joke,” Mary Jo decided that it was appropriate to tell, and thus it was that Mary Jo wrote her brother Lawrence and sister-in-law Rhonda to explain our situation. I don’t know how she wrote the letter, i.e. whether she phrased it as “we have changed” or “my husband did this to me” or “this happened to me initially, but I’ve come to love it,” and I didn’t ask to read the letter. I think your loved ones need to be able to come out to their relations in whatever way they choose.

The package mailed, we sat back and waited until Mary Jo saw an email in her inbox last night from Rhonda with the subject line “Surprise Letter.” “Hey,” she yelled across the house, “I think I got a letter from Rhonda. Should I open it?”

We looked at the subject line as a child would inspect a surprise package under the Christmas tree, and thought about what it might hold, whether rejection, confusion, anger, or acceptance. Properly steeled to the task, Mary Jo opened the email and read to herself while I waited in the other room. A few chuckles from her were encouraging and then she yelled, “I’m forwarding it to you — it’s going to be all right.”

Relief and another facade taken down. New family discussions initiated. Maybe a new wave of understanding across generations, geographies, and ideologies. Here’s Rhonda’s email, followed by Lawrence’s email a day later.

Rhonda

Thanks for letting us know what’s going on in your family. First, please be assured you, the boys, and Joyce are always welcome. I can’t image the changes coming about for all of you, but realize a great a deal of soul searching and mental anguish has taken place for all involved. I guess I should feel shocked and horrified, but I really don’t. I am involved in a book study with a church group (we’re reading The Shack), and were discussing subjects that are hard to comprehend just last Monday. A fellow teacher that works for the state shared that a guy at the department just announced that he was changing to a woman. The group discussed that some people just become trapped in a body that doesn’t conform to their minds and inner self. Good luck on the marriage part — I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know that I would want to be “married”, but I would still want my friend and buddy. I do feel the boys’ pain. As a middle school teacher, I already think middle schoolers are possessed by their hormones. They can cry one moment and curse fluently the next. They can be the most understanding, comforting bunch of kids that would give their lunch money to save a stray dog or to defend a fallen student, and yet, they will punch each other and tease the daylights out of a student for minor annoyances. Please keep the boys talking with you. They’ll need it.

I read the letter first and then shared it with Lawrence over supper. He really didn’t seem too shocked either. Maybe it’s part of getting old, we don’t shock easily and it just really doesn’t seem that big a deal. I really do feel for you having to share a house with another woman, though. I am perfectly happy that my daughters no longer live with me. I now deal only with my fluctuating hormones and occasional teary phone calls from the distant hormones. Just be firm in your guidelines. Don’t lend clothes and shoes. Make-up sharing is only for special occasions. Don’t share girl secrets unless they can be trusted not to tell. I’m glad you had the forethought to get the saddles in advance. Be sure to plan big for Joyce’s menopause–a cottage at the beach?

Lawrence

Very interesting news in your snail-mail package. I’ll confirm what Rhonda said in that we’re not especially shocked by the news and hope we can be as supportive as you need us to be. Certainly, you and the family are welcome here anytime. I wouldn’t know where to start with the questions and Rhonda is reading the book you sent along. I’ll try to read it this week and it might cut down on some of the questions. But we’ll likely save a chunk of this for when we see you in a few months.

As for Mom, I don’t think she’ll be especially shocked by the news. She’s surprised me how more-receptive to changes she seems to be now that the burden of worrying about carrying for Dad has been lifted. Incidentally, Rhon and I might jet down there on the “budget” airline that now runs for about $125/round trip. If we do, it’d be sometime during Rhon’s “spring break” which is the first full week of April. So if you’re not planning to tell Mom, you might give me your thoughts if she has picked up on any of this and starts asking me questions. We’ll obviously be talking about this for some time so I won’t load up one e-mail with every question that comes to mind. Again, just let us know if we can do anything for you and the family.

[See also Blood is Thicker Than Water, Part 1, Part 2, and Parts 3-7.]

Although the bulk of coming-out activities happened for me in February-May last year, and even though it’s the kind of news that one imagines will be on the cover of your hometown newspaper and spread like wildfire, many people did not learn of my transsexual transition in the first wave of coming out. Old school friends, distant cousins, friends of friends, children’s friends’ parents, and professionals with whom I only have contact once a year are among those that fall into this category.

What do I do? I look through my file of coming-out letters that was used so heavily last spring, open a copy, and revise, changing the future tense to past tense, adjusting some of the facts, and toning down the drama. And as I’m doing this, I marvel over what that season was like, how cloak-and-dagger, how carefully (I thought) managed and tracked — it was a big project and there were certain economies of scale at play in coming out to so many people.

By comparison, a “once-in-a-while” coming out is mentally more difficult for several reasons. First, this category of person wasn’t in the first wave because they weren’t in my daily circle, because Mary Jo and I wanted to hold back this news from them, or because I simply wasn’t aware of them. As such, my fear of rejection is much, much lower, and I find that my plaintive rhetoric of the spring is overwrought for these people. Second, coming out is simply not in the list of daily things I do, and it takes some mental effort to return to the project. Third, while I know what sort of questions the recipient is likely to have (they don’t change much through time), I’m in a much different place a year later, and it’s much harder for me to feel the extreme feelings or reactions (real or imagined) in this revelation. My existence feels so mundane to me now that I hardly feel it’s worth coming out any more; in other words, my life is normal to me, but may be extremely abnormal to others. And this is my flaw entirely, the flaw of failing to put myself into my reader’s head and matching my rhetoric with what they need — I’m just saying I find it very difficult. There’s something to be said for mutual exigency in a rhetorical act; if either party fails to feel it, I think the communication may be less successful.

Why come out to this group? When I get a Facebook query from an old high school classmate asking, “I went to school with your brother — where is he?” I feel compelled to explain that I am that person, not because I want to sensationalize my experience, but because it feels dishonest not to disclose my history. When I realize I need to meet with a family attorney or accountant, I know that they absolutely must know the truth if we are to be honest with each other, and I’m certainly not dressing up as George again to appease anyone (even if I could “pass” as him any more). When I feel a hankering to meet with my great-aunt and ask her stories of my grandmother and other family members on the Law side of the family, I realize that my transition is part of that family story, and she and her family need to know what I’ve done so that we can resume being family.

I may not be as effective or efficient at these second-wave disclosures as I was during the first-wave, but I don’t feel I can be wholly myself while maintaining a cloak of misinformation.