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. 

Porcupine Redoutable

‘What have I ever done to you, that you treat us this way?’

The first words out of her mouth when she got me on the phone.  The Bit-ler’s formidable aunt.  She’d never married, worked as a PA to someone powerful, the best a formidable woman could do at the time.  She cared for her parents, then her bachelor brother, living four score and seven years in the house where she was born, spreading her porcupine love. 

The Bit-ler was the first and last grandchild in that Irish Catholic family.  Her mother fared badly during delivery, so baby went home in Formidable Aunt's prickly arms until the disinterested mother could manage on her own.  I always felt you weren’t mine, you’d been switched at hospital with some queer folks’ baby.

The sisters' great war has lasted nearly a century, the Bit-ler sometimes ground they fight over.  And now Formidable’d rung about Disinterested thwarting best laid plans, etc.  The Bit-ler herself, out garnering support for her transition, her work, Disinterested’s care plans, leaving me fair game to Formidable’s tongue. 

‘What have I ever done to you, that you treat us this way?’

I hadn’t a clue, which was just as well because she didn’t want to start a fight with me.  Formidable vented her spleen about her Disinterested sister, then moved on to the Bit-ler, using male pronouns and names, asking why in the world I hadn’t left him, if it’d been her husband, sure to God she’d be long gone by now.

During the Bit-ler’s long ago childhood when DeValera and the clergy were still gods, Formidable knew what needed done, dragged an unenthusiastic Bit-ler to swimming lessons and scout meetings, altar boy practice and long, dull visits to relatives in the country while Disinterested Mother babysat someone else’s children.

I was spared witness of that, but not the bachelor brother’s 90^th birthday, attended by the only grandchild, the elderly siblings themselves and a couple no one seemed to know (descendants of someone’s illegitimate child, it was whispered).  Formidable had planned a tight schedule that required a forced march through dinner.  At the end of the meal, the waiter offered Bachelor Brother coffee.  Formidable said there wasn’t time and the waiter lost his mind.  It isn’t up to you if he has coffee. 

The manager was called, but by the time he got there, Bachelor Brother had talked Formidable out of making a complaint.  The couple nobody knew tried to make conversation while Disinterested Mother pretended to be senile and Bachelor Brother stared at his empty coffee cup.  Formidable across the circular table from me, silently waiting to pay the cheque, the expression on her face not anger, but shame.  I saw in that moment a lifetime of getting smacked in the face for being a porcupine, when a porcupine was what was needed.

I feel sorry for you, she says to me on the phone, sure I do, what with no family and I understand his principles, he thinks he’s a woman but couldn’t he put on a pair of slacks?  Lots of women do, you know.  And then she invites me to come over.  You like looking at old buildings, you could walk round Dublin and I wouldn’t tell a soul you were here.  I wouldn’t say a thing to anyone.  We could take in a couple of shows and I’d feed you a meal and then you could look at old buildings.  You’d like that, sure wouldn’t you?

And I realise here’s the first person to initiate support for what I'm experiencing.  There’s been coos and whispers of compassion, and poor El Punko has patiently listened, but here’s a concrete offer of befriending the invisible SOFFA in this maelstrom.  Not, Aren’t you brave?  Be sure to take care of yourself.   He . . . I mean she’s very lucky to have you.  An actual, Come here and let me take care of you.  From a porcupine.  God, it'd be hysterically funny if it weren't so terrible. 

In my imagination, Formidable and I become porcupine buddies, like nuns who always go round in pairs.  We take in a show and I shop for Christmas, poke my head inside old churches and listen to trad sessions in pubs.  In reality, I’d most likely end up throwing myself into the Liffey, but knowing that, I still feel a kinship with this Formidable woman, all quills and thorns and knowing what’s best in situations where she has no experience.  I see myself at my worst in her, so why not go over and be my worst, cackle at conjoined proclamations on the lesser-thans, get rid of all this anger and distress and disappointment, this feckin invisibility of being the one who always copes, plans, rescues, cheers, supports, while weeding gardens, painting furniture, cleaning, washing, and writing writing writing stuff that’s longlisted and shortlisted and destined to be rejected.  It’d be comforting to bond with the wicked in a place where I could be wicked and say it’s not fair, then leave it behind, a psychological dirty weekend.

I may pack my best porcupine outfit and head off to Dublin.  But don’t tell a soul I’ve gone.

Why the Bit-ler Cried at Brekky

It was an innocent enough thing to do, putting my hat on the rack, but it started a row of domino falls that ended in the Bit-ler crying. 

To know why that rack was there in the first place, I’d have to go back to a time before I knew her, when I lived in Ireland, my sister and her husband came to visit.  He went for a walk and came back with a mahogany board he’d found dumped in an empty lot.  He planned to hand wax it, then mount hooks on it for me.  He killed himself instead.

When I left Ireland, the man packing my things slagged me about the board – are there none in Scotland?  I said, there were none like this one.  I didn’t say it was a remnant of my dead brother-in-law’s love.  And where did that love start?  Well, because of the age difference between us, my sister brought him into the family when I was still a child, so I can’t say when it happened.  He was there until he wasn’t.  That’s not as glib a sequence as that sentence’s brevity implies.

It took five years for that board to become a coat rack.  Wherever I live, it lives, even though my brother-in-law's death destroyed my sister, and eventually my relationship with her.  So it came to the new house where El Punko and the Bit-ler bolted it to the wall a few weeks ago.  The fuzzy alpine hat that I hung there, I bought it on a shopping trip with that same sister when I took the Bit-ler to meet my family for the first time.  I loved that hat when I saw it in the shop.  I love it still.

And so does the Doodle.  She sees it hanging unprotected while the Bit-ler and I have brekky, and up she jumps, all 24” of her, to a 6’ height and I imagine hung her 50 pound self for a fraction of second, but long enough to pull the rack off the wall and make her escape, fuzzy hat in mouth. 

We hear the noise, the sound of wood rack against wood floor muffled by coats and scarves, the noise of crazy Doodle running through the house.  I keep brewing coffee while the Bit-ler checks on the odd sound, then comes back, sits at the table and cries.  The theft of the fuzzy alpine hat tipped the scales for her; she’d had enough.

Her tears could be explained by the 15 hour neurosurgical list she played gas-lady for, or the 250 page document bundle about a work conflict that takes her into a place where young soldiers and pregnant Afghans and dusty children who don’t scream, are torn to bits.  Or the request to console the family of a man she helped resuscitate on a train to get her hair, a man who later died.  Or maybe just the fact she’s expected to deal with things most of us can’t, and still organise care for her 90 year old mother, try to paint a manger for the strawberries between rain showers, and her wife (that would be me) wanting to drag her Irish Catholic arse to a pagan Samhain celebration, not to mention do her real life test when her hormones have her sanity by the throat.

How she got here, not so easily traced as the mahogany board cum coat rack torn down by the Doodle.  A favourite TV program about a GP watched forty years ago that led her to medicine.  An Ireland with no choice but to export its young.  A church, a society that says others are worse off than you, suffer now for a fictitious, posthumous reward she has no hope of receiving.  Prepped for sacrifice, served up to narcissists and scroungers, flying monkey children, bystanders pointing fingers YOU’RE WEAK YOU’RE WEAK YOU’RE WEAK all to keep her in harness, emptying pockets, casting off pride, locking caskets of dreams for the sake of other people’s agendas.  Because she was taught not to think of herself, so it’s herself she always thinking of, but in a not-nice way.

The vagaries of life, dependent on whether a hat’s hung on the rack in the hall or the closet. 

Misgender

I love words.  Their substance conjured out of nothingness.  Their power and scary magic.  The orgasmic joy of new words.  This fortnight, my new word’s been misgender.  

Misgender.

A prefix applied to various parts of speech to mean ill, mistaken, wrong, wrongly, incorrectly or simply negated

+

the state of being male or female, specifically referencing social or cultural differences, not biological ones.

A word with its DNA on its sleeve.  You know what it means immediately. 

Misgender.  Mis-gender?

Getting clocked, in other words.  Read.  Seen for what someone said you were, rather than what you are.

When El Punko first transitioned and was misgendered, he’d give a vicious stare and say, ‘I’m not a girl!’  As if being called a girl is an insult.  Well, it is in this culture, even if you are a girl, but if a man's mistaken for a woman, it’s not his fault.  It’s your fault for being so stupid. 

Now the Bit-ler, when referred to as ‘that man,’ looks at her colleagues who wait to see her reaction; they smile when she smiles.  If a woman is mistaken for male, it’s her fault for falling below the bar of what’s female.  It might embarrass you that you’ve called it to her attention, but really, if she’d get herself some bigger tits and spend more time painting her face and has she never heard of diets and body wear?  Geez-o-man, a little plastic surgery goes a long way.

Lil Miss Gender.  Ms Gender. 

When the Bit-ler tells me she’s been misgendered, the bra burner inside me rises up, furious that the most successful way to be a woman, regardless of anything else about you or what your sexual preference may be, is to fit inside a skin that’s attractive to men.  Which has always been a major brain fuck to me, that what is masculine decides what is feminine.  

Then I think, well, you aren’t biologically female.  You’re trans and how special is that?  Knock the boundaries off gender and be yourself.  BE yourself.  Be misgendered all over God’s green earth.

El Punko told me early in the game that he was sick of being so fucking special.  People just want to get on with life and not be singled out, for the most part.  Unless you’re a narcissist, I suppose.

So then the Pollyanna in me says, isn’t it great that trans-women broaden society’s concept of what is female?  By becoming more visible, they allow for greater variations on femininity.  In essence, allow women to take back what it means to be feminine.

Mizzy Gennuh.  Mzzgnnndrrrrrrrrr

But in actuality, that’s a load of meaningless bullshit to someone who’s been outside the gender gates their entire life.  

Misgender.  The new word that dashes hopes and aspirations, exiles, ostracises, shouts inadequacies from the rooftops with the utterance of a few simple words.  Misgender.

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.

Gender: Like God and the square root of minus one?

(This week, we're part of a blog tour for Anne Goodwin's debut novel, Sugar and Snails [Inspired Quill].  Check out her other stops, listed to the left.)

One of the many challenges of learning to write is in inhabiting the mind of another person, especially writing from the perspective of the opposite gender. I’ve been writing seriously for about twelve years, but still recall how anxious this used to make me. How could I – how dare I – channel the male perspective? Would readers perceive my attempts as inadequate, as fraudulent, even? Would critics strip me of my metaphorical clothes to expose the woman underneath?

Well, somehow, I managed. Yet even when I published a short story written from the male point of view, the question of gender didn’t go away. Now, when a new character took shape in my mind, I had to ask myself what was it that made this one female and that one male? I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

I was used to considering gender from a feminist perspective, in terms of societal privileging of the male. But that was gender operating from the outside; I hadn’t thought a lot about gender operating from the inside since I was a child. Even then, I don’t think I thought about it much. Yet, for discreet periods in my childhood, I’d wanted to be a boy.

Now, I don’t know whether it was due to my admiration of my older brother, an early recognition of where the power lay or merely wanting to be what I was not, but it seemed to be a phase that passed. And yet I don’t think it was resolved by a particularly strong identification with the concept of “girl” or “woman”. How could it be, when I barely understand what those terms mean?

Anne Goodwin

The more I explored the concept of gender, the more slippery it seemed to be. The small biological differences between male and female newborns don’t seem sufficient to account for this tendency to split humanity into two halves. The stereotype of “woman” as someone with long hair and lipstick who likes to go shopping makes me laugh. Yet if that stereotype were imposed on me, I’d probably end up slashing my wrists.

In 1995, I renewed my passport, in readiness for a three-month trip abroad. This being my first European Community passport, the layout was different to before. But it wasn’t until I was standing in line at some dusty South American border crossing that I realised there was an error in the demographic details at the back: under sex was printed the letter M for male. Despite the document having got me safely through several borders already, I was anxious. What if the immigration officers queried my identity? What if they wouldn’t let me through?

Of course, no-one batted an eyelid and, although I always meant to do something about the anomaly, I kept that passport for its full ten years. Whenever I remembered I ought to get it altered, it was always too close in time to another departure abroad. So I crossed my fingers and carried on.

My experience suggests that, while officialdom demands that people be identified as either male or female, it often doesn’t always matter which you choose. But my mild anxiety of being “outed” alerted me to the way in which daily life is unnecessarily complicated for people whose official gender contradicts the gender they perceive themselves to be. Not only on a passport they might use a couple of times a year, but on their driving licence, health service records and job application forms. If the essence of maleness and femaleness is contested, why insist on classifying people by a binary concept that can be, for some people, a source of pain?

This was one of the themes I wanted to explore in my debut novel, Sugar and Snails. But, while I’ve definitely learnt a lot in the process, I still don’t know for sure what makes me identify as a woman and my husband as a man. My attitude is articulated towards the end of the novel by Venus, my main character’s best friend: 

I always thought gender studies was a load of nothing, like doing research on The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Gruffalo … Of course it’s humongously complex … In fact it’s such a fuzzy concept, so hard to pin down, it ought not to matter a jot. But it does. Tremendously. Like God and the square root of minus one. (Sugar and Snails, p318) 

(I’m assuming God requires no explanation but, for those who aren’t mathematicians, the square root of minus one is a hypothetical construct that vastly extends the number system and is fundamental to many developments in geometry, physics and engineering.)

About a year ago, I received a form from some organisation collecting basic demographic data on its members. There were the usual age and ethnic groupings but, when it came to gender, there was a third option alongside male and female. I was delighted to be able to tick “prefer not to say”, my very small act of solidarity with those for whom the two-category split is overly simplistic.

Anne Goodwin writes fiction, short and long, and blogs about reading and writing, with a peppering of psychology. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was published last month by Inspired Quill. Catch up on her website: annethology or on Twitter @Annecdotist.

Links:

Sugar and Snails on the Inspired Quill website

http://www.inspired-quill.com/books/sugar-and-snails/

Sugar and Snails on Anne’s website 

http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/sugar-and-snails.html

Sugar and Snails on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Snails-Anne-Goodwin/dp/1908600470/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438678640&sr=8-1&keywords=Sugar+and+Snails

Sugar and Snails on Amazon.co.uk

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B010O8F9M6/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=B010O8F9M6&linkCode=as2&tag=theatrieastbo-21&linkId=KSU3WUKP4NSHQLKD