Same as it Ever Was?

With Mary Jo at an equestrian event and the boys over at the Rapido household playing all day, I found myself reading this blog and my trans* oriented correspondence from the beginning. I was surprised to feel quite a lot of sympathy for the writer, who was obviously struggling in the beginning to find her voice, fumbling along in the first few months. Along the way, however, I believe I have found a good voice, stumbling upon it perhaps in November or December.

What’s really strange about reading this chronicle is that sometimes I feel like I’m on auto-pilot, or that there’s a prime mover or a puppeteer making things happen and I’m only along for the ride, kind of sleep walking in a hazy and surreal existence. In other words, I know I have deliberated and reasoned the various decisions I’ve made, but having done these things (hormones, therapy, FFS, laser, electrolysis, coming out, full-time, etc.), I sometimes don’t remember having been as deliberate as I believe I was.

I can think of hundreds of moments — epiphanies, if you want — where I find myself a bit surprised at how I look or what I’m doing. I find myself in a hotel lobby with a hundred trans*people and ask myself what brought me here? Or I’m chatting with a mechanic about a flat tire, and then it strikes me that I’m someone different — I’m in drag…no, wait, it’s not drag, it’s normal. It’s like the Talking Heads song “Once In A Lifetime,” about those moments of shock when you ask yourself “Well, how did I get here?” or “My God, what have I done?”

At the same time, having written and thought and processed every minute facet of my life and relationships, it seems unlikely that this is truly some kind of auto-pilot, but maybe the kind of forgetfulness that comes from great struggle like childbirth or wilderness survival or extreme grief. Maybe this forgetfulness comes from the fact that there is no time to pause because we’re careening around a track and it’s very important to have eyes forward, scanning back and forth for the next problem to present itself. If this is the case, then the paradox is that while a transsexual transition is most definitely a long-term project, the transitioner in question employs a relatively short-range focus that involves close relationships, the next hormone appointment, the state of her beard, and the constant anxiety about whether she’ll “pass” today or not.

Both the past and the distant future fall away in a haze like the curvature of the earth, and I find that despite living and breathing and thinking gender for quite some time, I find that I an fairly confused about what it means to be moving towards my goal of being a woman.

There is no doubt I’m a real transsexual, but a woman? I’m not so certain — perhaps I’m a faux woman because I feel I’ll always be a transsexual and never a real woman. How could I, with 48 years as a boy and man and husband and father? Intellectually, I don’t really mind because I think trans* is a legitimate category of human being, someone with an interesting past, like your friend who tells you over cocktails that they used to live in the circus — who isn’t attracted to that sort of history?

The more I reflect on the subject, however, I suspect it’s probably not a matter of real vs. faux, but rather real vs. idealized. During a lifetime of envying the other sex’s bodies, I think many transsexuals have spent so much time imagining an idealized body (female or male, depending on your flavor of trans* dysphoria) that when we finally take steps to do something about it, being a “real woman” (or a “real man”) carries risks of not being enough, of not being able to match that lifetime of imagining. We complain about being too tall, too short, of not having big enough hips, or too-large shoulders, and in doing so, we aren’t really in the realm of trans* psychology, but rather in the realm of body image issues, where we have a picture of the ideal (from our friends, advertising, movies, magazines, and so on), and we feel deficient in our “real” bodies.

When I complain about having no hips or no waist, my women friends rattle off their various imperfections and say something like “welcome to the club.” Maybe that’s the way to emerge out of the transsexual transition, accepting the fact that I, like real women, have to accept a real and imperfect body and to find comfort in who I am. If you’re short, you make “short” work for you — if you’re big, you embrace your bigness and make it work for you. I see photos of myself and I like my smile and I think I’m genuinely happy and project confidence in the new me, so I know that at some deep biological and psychological level, I have come to a spot of peace with myself. Maybe I should just say this is my body, and this is what I’ve got to work with: tallish, thin, striking features, and an interesting history?

For those of us engaged in a transsexual transition, it’s important to get out of that short-term forgetfulness, perplexity, and fixation on today’s body, hair, clothes, and work hard to be mindful of how we got here and also how we’re going to live our lives after all this dramatic turmoil is over. I don’t think we want life to be the same as it ever was, an unbroken chain of repetitive thoughts and fears that keep us stuck in fretful sleepwalking and confusion. We want to see clearly with eyes of the world opened to our past and our futures, awake, alert, and content.

 

Dark Places

Early this morning, I was just reading one of my online forums and saw a horribly sad piece of news: a member of this particular forum, a 50-year-old transsexual who’s at the same spot in transition as me, died yesterday of a drug overdose, a suicide. She posted infrequently, but I remember her avatar with glasses, face against a tree, inquisitive and wise. Her posts were thoughtful as she grappled with her transition and how it impacted her two daughters, her spouse, and her job. She had written in the springtime of an amicable divorce and a date of July for her workplace transition — she had been talking with her HR department in anticipation of the big announcement.

I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know her, but this news feels so personal it might be me. I can imagine the despair.

Dear readers, I know that sometimes it seems that your transsexual friends or colleagues or family members are going through life in a self-absorbed trance like beauty queens with their emphasis on makeup and shopping and physical changes.

And perhaps we are.

But when we’re by ourselves, when the computer is turned off, when the upbeat facade is removed and put away on the shelf, there’s nothing to hold back the demons. There are very dark spaces in trans*people’s heads, and I worry about all of us sometimes. As much as we beat our chests in defiance and celebrate our gender freedom, I fear we’re an awfully vulnerable lot.

 

You Look Good in My Skirt

For some reason, I have been listening to a lot of country music on the radio lately, something I’ve never done before. Maybe it’s got something to do with getting older, losing my parents, having kids, or undergoing a transsexual transition. I don’t know. All I can say is what’s on the radio today isn’t my father’s country music. I will try to understand this trend more in subsequent posts because if my musical tastes are changing along with my sex, then I’ll end up spending more money on music than on clothes!

In this post, let me write about a guy I had heard on the radio a hundred times, but whom the DJ’s never identified. He had this one song where he’s licking his wounds and tells his lover to take her cat and leave his sweater, and that she’ll think of him. And he’s got this other one about an ex-lover staying the night and looking good in his shirt. Now you country fans are no doubt mocking me for being so ignorant, but until a couple of days ago (when a DJ accidentally told me his name), I didn’t know that this fellow’s name is Keith Urban. I was at the music store with the boys and I figured I’d see if he has any CD’s, and sure enough he does. I found the one with “You’ll Think of Me” and “You Look Good In My Shirt” and gave it a listen. Good songwriting, good musicianship, and an all-round fun listen.

But here’s where gender rears its ugly head. I was enjoying his song about this lover looking good in his shirt when I began to sing a slight variation, substituting “skirt” for “shirt”:

And maybe it’s a little too early
To know if this is gonna work
All I know is you’re sure looking
Good in my skirt

I pictured someone like Shania Twain singing these exact same lyrics and telling her ex lover who has spent the night that he sure looks good in her skirt. What would be the difference? Wouldn’t it be the same cute sentiment? Not on your life. The difference would be enormous — “normal” people would call it perverted, the thought that a) a man would wear his girlfriend’s skirt and b) she’d accept it, encourage it, and sing about it. It comes back to the difference in the words “feminine” and “effeminate” that I tried to articulate a few months back.

The ex-girlfriend sleeping with the singer and wearing his shirt in the morning is tender, child-like, and a little vulnerable. But the opposite, while it ought to connote the same tenderness, strikes us as odd, effeminate, and weak. Of course it’s ok for women to wear her lover’s shirt — who wouldn’t want to wear a man or be a man, honestly? But the opposite, for the lover to wake up and put on his girlfriend’s clothes, is comical because no “real” man would ever subject himself to that sort of ridicule or lower himself to the woman’s position. Femininity in men is frightening and pathetic, and men who seek it are wusses and women who encourage it are perverted.

Still, I’d love to see Shania Twain sing it that way. Or better yet, Keith Urban (who seems pretty secure in his sexuality) could wear a pretty skirt on stage and sing the song this way.

All I know is I’m sure looking
Good in your skirt

 

Personality by the Numbers

Invited by someone’s post on a discussion board, I gave this personality test a spin. I found it hard to answer some of the questions because I feel as if my mind’s a moving target now. I was aware of thinking as I hovered over my answer to any given question, “am I like this now, or have I been like this in the past, or am I moving towards this in the future?”

Gender Identity and Gender Expression apparently have an impact on one’s perceived personality — Richard Docter conducted research in the 80’s where he asked crossdressers at various national gender conventions and support groups to take the Meyers-Briggs personality test once in boy-mode (these were all MTF’s, by the way), and again a week or two later while socializing in girl-mode, and he found that the test results were quite different. I’m not aware (but I haven’t kept up with the literature) of similar tests conducted on transsexuals, perhaps once while they were closeted and doing ok with GID, once in the throes of depressing GID, once after self-acceptance and transition, and once after transition is over — I have a hunch, however, that the numbers would be different for every test.

I’m not sure these tests mean anything. I took the MBTI in grad school and was INTP, and again in my MBA program 10 years later I was INTJ. I wonder if a year and a half of hormones would shift the third variable away from T(hinking) and more towards F(eeling)? In any case, in the interest of full disclosure, these are my results from the Similar Minds website (the one I took happens to be “The Big 45 Personality Test”)

Advanced Big 45 Personality Test Results Gregariousness ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Sociability ||||||||||||||| 50% Assertiveness |||||||||||||||||| 58% Poise ||||||||||||||||||||| 70% Leadership ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Provocativeness ||||||||||||||| 46% Self-Disclosure |||||||||||||||||| 58% Talkativeness ||||||||||||||| 50% Group Attachment ||||||||| 30% Extroversion |||||||||||||||||| 54% Understanding ||||||||||||||||||||| 70% Warmth ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Morality |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 86% Pleasantness |||||||||||||||||||||||| 74% Empathy ||||||||||||||||||||| 70% Cooperation |||||||||||||||||||||||| 74% Sympathy ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Tenderness |||||||||||||||||| 54% Nurturance |||||||||||||||||| 58% Accommodation ||||||||||||||||||||| 68% Conscientiousness |||||||||||||||||||||||| 78% Efficiency ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Dutifulness |||||||||||||||||||||||| 78% Purposefulness ||||||||||||||| 50% Organization ||||||||||||||||||||| 70% Cautiousness |||||||||||||||||| 54% Rationality ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Perfectionism |||||||||||| 38% Planning ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Orderliness ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Stability ||||||||||||||| 46% Happiness ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Calmness ||||||||||||||||||||| 62% Moderation ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Toughness ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Impulse Control |||||||||||||||||| 54% Imperturbability |||||| 14% Cool-headedness |||||||||||||||||| 58% Tranquility |||||| 18% Emotional Stability ||||||||||||||| 49% Intellect |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 90% Ingenuity |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 86% Reflection ||||||||||||||||||||| 66% Competence |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 90% Quickness |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 90% Introspection |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 82% Creativity |||||||||||||||||||||||| 78% Imagination ||||||||||||||||||||| 70% Depth |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 86% Openmindedness |||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 82%

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personality tests by similarminds.com

Factor		low score	high score
Gregariousness	66%	quiet, reclusive	engaging, socially bold
Sociability	50%	withdrawn, hidden	warm, open, inviting
Assertiveness	58%	timid, gunshy	controlling, aggressive
Poise	70%	uneasy around others	socially comfortable
Leadership	62%	stays in background	prefers to lead
Provocativeness	46%	modest, plays it safe	bold, uninhibited, cocky
Self-Disclosure	58%	private, contained	very open and revealing
Talkativeness	50%	quiet, stealthy, invisible	motor mouth, loud
Group Attachment	30%	loves solitude	prefers to be with others
Understanding	70%	insensitive, schizoid	respectful, sympathetic
Warmth	62%	disinterested in others	supportive, helpful
Morality	86%	break/ignore the rules	play by the rules
Pleasantness	74%	aloof or disagreeable	gets along with others
Empathy	70%	out of tune w/ others	in tune with others
Cooperation	74%	competitive, warlike	agreeable, peaceful
Sympathy	66%	socially inconsiderate	socially conscious
Tenderness	54%	cold hearted, selfish	warm hearted, selfless
Nurturance	58%	self pleasing, me first	people pleasing, me last
Conscientiousness	78%	reckless, unscheduled	careful, planner
Efficiency	66%	unreliable, lazy	finisher, follows through
Dutifulness	78%	leisurely, derelict	strict, rule abiding
Purposefulness	50%	inattentive, undisciplined	prepared, focused
Organization	70%	relaxed, oblivious	detail oriented, anal
Cautiousness	54%	impulsive, spendthrift	restrained, cautious
Rationality	66%	irrational, random	direct, logical
Perfectionism	38%	careless, error prone	detail obsessed
Planning	62%	disorganized, random	scheduled, clean
Stability	46%	easily frustrated	calm, cool, unphased
Happiness	62%	unhappy, dissatisfied	self content, positive
Calmness	62%	touchy, volatile	even tempered, tolerant
Moderation	66%	needs instant gratification	easily delays gratification
Toughness	66%	hypersensitive, moody	thick skinned
Impulse Control	54%	lacks self control	maintains composure
Imperturbability	14%	highly emotional	emotionally contained
Cool-headedness	58%	demanding, controlling	accommodating
Tranquility	18%	emotionally volatile	emotionally neutral
Intellect	90%	instinctive, non-analytical	intellectual, analytical
Ingenuity	86%	lacks new ideas	innovative, novel
Reflection	66%	unreflective, coarse	art and beauty lover
Competence	90%	slow to understand/think	intellectual, brainy
Quickness	90%	intellectually dependent	intellectually independent
Introspection	82%	not self reflective	self searching
Creativity	78%	dull headed	synthesizer, iconoclast
Imagination	70%	practical, realistic	dreamer, unrealistic
Depth	86%	lacks curiosity	mental explorer

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personality tests by similarminds.com