Woodpecker Asks

The tag line under this site’s title reads, The first year of my partner’s gender transition.  This month, that year is up.  So a little reflection.

About a decade ago, my spouse (who’s now known as Siobhán) first admitted to me her gender dysphoria – being transsexual.  I turned to the folk who’d helped me with my son El Punko’s transition – Transfamily –  a web support group with chatrooms for different family member groups.

Their trans-parents chatroom had been full of concern and worry and the grief that comes when you realise your child’s future will always have this gargantuan   

It's behind you!

THiNG in it. 

The spouse chatroom had ANGER.  Understandably so.  Most, like myself, hadn’t been told what they were getting into before they married.  Few, if any, had been through a transition before.  And let’s face it, our culture is SO focused on sex, sexual orientation, sex, sexual identity and did I say SEX, that while the supportive trans-parent becomes an archetype of parental love, the supportive trans-spouse gets tarred with the weirdo-pervert-just-plain-crazy brush.

As one of Siobhán’s friends said, Lora didn’t sign up to be a lesbian.  As if that’s all marriage is about.

I didn’t last long in the spouse chatroom.  The only bits of advice I remember were (1) Don’t let her EVER wear your clothes and (2) be prepared for her to turn into Uber Diva.  

Pre-Uber Diva

To be honest, Siobhán’s clothes are nicer than mine, so I steal hers.  And Uber Diva?  Puh-leeeeeze. The woman’s a huge softy, quietly in the background making sure everyone gets more than what they need.

At least pre-transition, she was.

Fast forward to last June. 

Between the two of us, I don’t know who was more excited about Siobhán’s transition.  I certainly showed it more, although I did have a sense that neither of us could know how much this would challenge us. 

And it was exciting, all the firsts.  First pre-transition talk at work, first hair, first posh do.  Four months into it, though, I started not feeling well You go without me, missing out on this and that until my life gradually became days of watching wildlife in the trees outside my bedroom window.

Blech!  Not this kisser.

For years, they tell me, 

                  an 

insidious medical problem 

quietly sneaked up on me

until . . . 

         POW 

right in the kisser.

Although I didn’t have the focus to write, my brain still worked like a writer’s brain, so I did what writers do – observe, observe, quietly and mutely observe.

As a result, I became a spectator rather than a supporter of Siobhán’s transition.  

And I noticed a few things.

(1)  I'm extraneous to everyone in her life, friends and involved professionals alike.  As any non-professional SOFFA* will tell you, we’re excluded from the process for confidentiality reasons, but there’s also no supports for us in place.  The most important people in the trans-person’s life and no one takes care of us.  As if that doesn’t negatively affect the trans-person.  I’ve offered my professional skills on occasion to develop support groups for myself and others, only to be patted on the head and sent back to my hole where hopefully I’ll stay.

(2)  I suspect when a person waits this long for validation, it becomes addictive once she finally gets it  This means that advice given by casual strangers or the sudden interest from people who’ve not been overly compassionate with Siobhán in the past, carries more weight than the last 10 years of my consistent support.  It’s maybe this particular dynamic that prompted the warnings in the trans-spouse chatroom to watch out for Uber Diva.  There’s certainly been the rare sighting of her in my house during the last year.

(3)  The dominant culture for male-to-female transition equates 

female 

    with 

glamorous. 

Many, many people, both trans and SOFFA, refer to the beginning of transition as a second adolescent.  All of the above, even Uber Diva, is stuff Siobhán should’ve done as a teenager.  And although I’m not her mother, the spouse is often put into that pseudo-parental test-the-limits-in-a-safe-place position as the trans-person explores their representation of gender.

I understand this, but I'm tired from being powed in the kisser.

A year after starting her Real Life Test, Siobhán’s finally had her first appointment at the NHS gender clinic.  In case you're not familiar, the clinic's supposed to help in transition, not rubber stamp it once it's done.  I've been there, done that with El Punko’s struggle to get adequate medical care; the memory wears me out.  

Siobhán’s friends come over and discuss hair, voice, hips, until my eyes roll back in my head.  All my adult life, I’ve dealt with this What A Woman Should Be shite. 

I’ve paid my dues.  

To hell with social norms.  

Be a goddam trans woman, 

not Cait feckin Jenner.

I’ve become a trans-heretic. 

Our woodpecker.

If I were healthy, this wouldn't be so in-my-face because I’d be up to my eyes in writing and gardening, painting furniture and chasing a Doodle over the moors.  With my own interests taking centre stage, I’d be supportive.  I’d play fair.  

But you know what?  Fairness is a social construct with shifting goal posts.  A 16 year cancer patient taught me that.  She said there’s no reason for anything.  

Life just is.  

Get on with it. 

Out the window, I see woodpeckers nesting in the back garden.  In my pantheistic mentality inherited from a Leni Lenape grandmother, Woodpecker is birth medicine; it beats the drum of honouring ones unique path, rejecting conformity.  

Appropriate for a heretic.

If I were healthy, I’d be writing.  Or gardening.  Or painting furniture and chasing the Doodle across the moors, although not at the same time.  I’m not healthy but I am a realist.  Woodpecker says, even though I’m sick, get up from the trans table and find my own project away from the sound of other people’s drums.

I’ll let you know 

when I get there. 

*  Significant Others, Friends, Family, Advocates

The Trouble With Compromise

It doesn’t take a genius to realise this has been the year of the Great Compromise for me.  But it took a Doodle to make me consider what I was doing.

Ready for Samhain!

The plan, light a bonfire and supervise it while partaking in some nearby pruning.  When the Doodle grabbed a burning stick and raced across the garden, my multi-tasking idea went straight to hell. 

I got a canvas chair and sat by the fire.  No great chore because October’s probably my favourite season, the beginning and end of the year.  The expectations of spring, the hard work and giddy results of summer are over.  All that’s left is to clear away success and failure, get ready to hunker down for the long dark hours of Winter’s death and gestation.  Maybe do a bit of reflection.

Which brought me to the Great Compromise.  Not that I’m one of the shocking holy martyrs, mind you.  When the Bit-ler’s friends ask about my reaction to her transition (Lora didn’t sign up to be a lesbian, sure she didn’t), she’s lying when she tells them she couldn’t do it without me.  (Did you never feckin think that maybe I didn’t want to go through another goddam transition????)

One of each, please.

Sometimes another person’s dream is so big and so hard, there’s no room for you.  It’s what any Great Compromise is about.  If you need the last slice of cheesecake more than I do, you can have it.  But how do I know when you need it more than myself?  

While in Dublin trying (and failing) to sort out her mother’s care arrangements, the Bit-ler was invited home for dinner by an old school chum.  She offered to come as male, as if somehow this were a kindness to the family.  Old Chum accepted, so the Bit-ler pulled back her hair extensions, ditched the bra and went a la man-boobs. 

No explanation of her U2 Roadie hairstyle was given to the adult children, but another school friend was there.  After the kids scattered, he asked the Bit-ler if she were transitioning, got confirmation, then asked the usual question about what junk she still had in her trousers and that was about it.  No big deal.  Except that the Bit-ler’d been left sick in herself, relapsing into that male façade.

So really, what was the reason for the compromise? 

Let's make a joint decision.

That’s the difficulty with compromise, knowing where you end and I begin.  Should I do something simply because I have the strength to do it?  Should you accept my offer simply because I’ve made it?  Or should we both take responsibility for what’s happening here and decide jointly what’s fair to us both?

To be honest, I don’t know many people who do that, which is more a statement about myself than about most people.  During this year of the Great Compromise, it’s been the friends who were closest to me, who didn’t understand what I needed.  I suspect that’s because I don’t know how to not compromise.  And people like that.

So that’s my resolution for this coming year.  To figure out where you end and I begin.  To not do things simply because I’m strong enough.  To figure out what my Great Want for myself is.  Probably something to do with cheesecake. 

There's No Place Like Home

Four months into the Bit-ler’s Real Life Test, she has to go sort out her mother. 

Raise your hands, all you who had an involuntary shudder at that sentence.  I'd need a pint of damson gin myself, with a baby sham chaser.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to go.

The last time these two women were together, one presented herself as male and told her mother she planned to transition.  That’s when her Disinterested Mother confessed she’d always thought the Bit-ler’d been switched at birth with some queer folks’ chillen, then followed up the visit with phone calls about whether or not the Bit-ler should absent herself from Disinterested Mother’s funeral, or the funeral itself be moved to some other city, possibly some other country so no one would know about the transition.

‘You’ll be dead, Mam.  What’s it matter, so?’

With this sympatica between them, the Bit-ler trots off to Dublin to pry her mother out of a geriatric ward against her will and settle her into a nursing home.  The Bit-ler’s hair extensions mean she presents as female but travels with a male passport, hair pulled back, inciting a curious look or two from Border Control. 

Her mother’s delighted to see her, says the Bit-ler’s looking well.  It transpired that Disinterested Mother didn’t recognise her daughter, and the next hospital visit produced a litany of improvements the Bit-ler should make about her hair, her clothing, and jaysus, didn’t the Bit-ler’s school chum drop by wearing a three piece suit and why wouldn’t he, since he works in the hospital? 

‘Which is why he did, Mam.’

The Bit-ler tells me all this on the phone, thinking it’s funny that said chum described her hairstyle as U2 Roadie and I’m all, What-er you on about, your hair’s gorgeous, and then she admits she’s spent her whole Dublin visit with her hair tied back. 

No curling iron. 

No straightener. 

No hair spray. 

Gargoyle Possom (RIP)

I don’t understand.  All those mornings up at stupid o’clock so she wouldn’t look like Gargoyle Possum dragged backwards through a hedge.

It’s because she’s home, she says.  Her mother, her porcupine aunt, the neighbour’s chillen, her school chum, there’s no place like home to show you that the longer you know someone, the more you have to lose. 

My Butler-in-Transition with her suede boots and turquoise jewellery and lemon shoulder bag, the look of pure joy on her face when she got her hair extensions, and she ties it all back so people’ll still love her.  My heart cracks a little and a small animal inside it, keens. 

I Should Cry More

Tom Selleck’s in my dream.  Tom of Magnum not Blue Bloods, the smiling renegade in shorts she wakes me up at stupid o’clock to curl her hair I can’t even think, my bladder’s awake Tom don’t go!  I have to curl hair that isn’t mine so I piss and she’s got one leg in her tights but sits for me anyway because she knows how much this costs without me saying a £2000 rat’s nest on top of her head she can’t know what she doesn’t feel and my voice breaks but tears don’t come I know it’s not fair she knows it’s not fair but it’s not her fault and I feel guilty that she thinks it is.  She can’t go to work as an Irish Rastafarian but this isn’t all a woman is, how she looks, what she wears but she’s not a woman unless she has hair and makeup and a size B cup because that’s what the woman in HR said.

I’m in a life where needs get met but they aren’t mine. 

Connected to her transition by a curling iron, I look out the bedroom window.  The flowerbed that was mint and money plant with a canopy of bramble when we moved in, now Queen Victoria, golden rod, buddlea, sunflower, nasturtium, dahlia, hydrangea, those tiny pink flowers on the black grass.  Mist rises behind the rhododendron, cuts off tree trunks so they float in time to a childhood where I was invisible because I was the one most likely to mention things that were meant to be ignored.  I learned my invisibility well.  I learned you don’t cry, you don’t speak, not so much because bad things happen but because nothing happens.

Crying means either hope or utter desolation.  I’m never utterly desolated.  I don’t succeed in despair.  Too childlike for depression.  But I’ve forgotten hope.  Not childlike enough for magic.  A life without gradations.  The life of an invisible cog in a machine that manufactures things I cannot see, let alone enjoy.

Crying would mean things should be different, someone should hear me.  Crying means hope.  Hope means the Irish Rastafarian rat’s nest is actually quite funny and me tending it while she sits with one leg in her tights, Wee Bit-ler Winky, a scene from Mrs Brown.

I should cry more.