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.

 

Trans-fer

Is it possible that what some people call “transphobia” involves a fear that if you deal with transpeople (or even the topic of transness in general) something will rub off on you? I’d like to take a few paragraphs to play around with this concept of the transfer of unsavory characteristics on others. We might playfully spell it trans-fer and treat it like cooties, which everyone knows that kids of the opposite sex can give you if you touch them.

Even though I’m not condoning various phobias about groups, some of the stereotypical origins of these fears is fairly easy to imagine.

Xenophobia is a fear of strangers, and I suppose these strangers might steal your stuff or hurt you. Or they’ll overthrow your ways and make you adhere to new customs, foods, and languages. In any case, like the saying goes, “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” and I would imagine you can extend the idea of “being with” to “looking like.”

Homophobia is a fear of homosexuals, and I suppose the most obvious stereotypical fear is that they might jump you and make you do unnatural sexual things. If it’s not about sex, but about gay culture, then we’d be back in the xenophobia camp, wouldn’t we?

I’m not sure what sort of threat trans-people pose to “normal” folk, whether it’s real or imagined. I think, though, it has to do with a combination of the xenophobia and homophobia mentioned above. Trannies are foreign, with foreign ways. They do not adhere to the norms of bi-gendered society, and thus threaten those who live by this code. Like gays, they do unnatural things to their bodies, but even go further to surgically alter their bodies. Furthermore, they’re like foreign spies — they dress deceptively and fool you into thinking they’re something they’re not, and no one likes to be made a fool, right?

Broadly speaking, transsexuals don’t live up to the man/woman binary that everyone else supposedly does. Not only that, but they willingly violate these norms of dress or manner or body.

Ok, good enough. But how would that affect a “normal” person? I think what’s at the root of this trans-fear is the possibility of a trans-fer of loose sexual identity to others so that they might become sissies, or they might want to learn about these freaks, or they might reveal a tiny weakness in themselves that they find transness interesting, and if they opened themselves up to inquiry, there would be a social trans-fer so that everyone else would think they weren’t normal. I keep typing the word “normal,” and I think that what xenophobia and homophobia and transphobia have in common is that normal people feel assaulted — their local/national identity is under attack, their strong sense of sexual orientation is under attack, and their very clear understanding of what’s male and female, or masculine and feminine, is under attack.

It’s the dogma of normalcy itself that’s under attack, and if you believe it and have been indoctrinated into it and you know that God ordained it, then it doesn’t surprise me that you feel attacked. And I’m sorry you feel that way, because being under attack, physically, mentally, or emotionally, is no fun.

But here’s my problem. If you are that certain of your dogma, what are you afraid of? Meeting a transgendered person shouldn’t rock your faith. Shaking hands with a foreigner with different voice, skin color, religion, or dress shouldn’t rock your faith. Having a homosexual colleague or friend shouldn’t rock your faith.

And yet well-meaning people in news stories and blogs and books repeatedly describe a slippery slope brought on by the onslaught of undesirable people and their ways. If we allow a “man in a dress” to use the ladies’ restroom, it will be the undoing of all gender norms. If we let the Arabs into our country, it will be the undoing of the Christian society. If we allow gays to have their way, it will be the undoing of straight society.

It’s an easy step from phobia to hate, it seems to me. And once you’re there, it’s not about getting cooties, but about eradication.

 

Bosses Day

I was reading today’s list of events, and was reminded of today’s Boss’s lunch that our secretaries throw for us yearly. I suddenly remembered, and I had completely forgotten this incident, last year’s Boss’s day at a local restaurant. I was just beginning this terrible slide into self-awareness of my transgenderism, and Mary Lou, as part of her ice-breaker technique during lunch, said something like, I know something about one of our bosses that no one knows. She paused and everyone at the table leaned in, ready for juicy gossip.

I was mortified — what if she somehow knew I was transgendered? Why would she do this to me? I got an adrenaline rush, my body flushed, and I anticipated being terribly embarrassed. I steeled myself to quickly think of a joke, an intellectual observation, something or anything that would deflect attention away from me.

As it was, it was related to me, but nothing that caused the earth to swallow me up — something like “two of our male bosses have pierced ears and used to wear earrings.” Shawn and I both confessed, which everyone knew, anyway, and we mumbled something about graduate school and youth, and that was that.

But that dread, that sense of impending doom that I felt at being outed, is something I’ve felt my entire life. I think it created a lot of my persona, secretive and guarded, that I don’t think would have been a part of me otherwise. It’s easy to focus on the obvious, and funny, changes that one undertakes when dealing with this problem — because they’re so present and so different that they demand attention. But what’s really also interesting is the impact of this secret on one’s development, and that’s not nearly as visible to others because you are already who you are and you can’t reengineer the past. As we work on ourselves in therapy and in reflection, it seems to me that equal attention ought to be paid to the past, as well as the future, not that you can change the past, but you can have moments of insight when you suddenly see a pattern or a reason for the way you are.

It’s not helpful to think of a “real” you that needs revealing and that there’s a “fake” you that’s been an imposter in your body for all your life. I suppose some might find comfort in that, but I don’t — I am completely real and my life experiences have brought me to this point. Perhaps there are hundreds of alternative universes with different versions of me in them, and while it might be a fun mind-experiment designed to blow the lid of one’s sense of pre-destination, I don’t know what else you do with it except mourn those alternatives that have you happier, healthier, or wiser and breathe a sigh of relief about those alternatives that found you dead, sick, down-and-out, and generally more miserable than you are in this reality.