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

The Goddess of Femininity

For those of you coming late to the party, I’m married to a trans woman who started her Real Life Test about seven weeks ago. 

There are many gates a trans person has to go through in order to transition; to my eye, the Real Life Test (RLT) is about the most asinine.  Essentially, without medical intervention, the trans person is expected to live in their identified gender for a specific period of time (often a year, but gender clinic waiting lists can protract this) before the medical folk get on board. 

While it’s easier to pass as male during the Female-to-Male RLT, it isn’t especially easy and it’s potentially dangerous if you live near roving Neanderthal tribes.  The Male-to-Female RLT is not only difficult and dangerous, but a lesson in humiliation.  So in other words, if you aren’t killed or don’t kill yourself during your RLT, we’ll give you medical treatment. 

My partner, the Bit-ler (Butler-In-Transition) is fortunate that firstly, she can afford to spend a coupla thousand quid on a hair system with a monthly maintenance bill of about £100, (not counting transport costs, since there’s only a handful of places in the UK who ‘install’ this type of system).  She can also afford to attend an endocrinologist privately – not only does she have this B cup I keep rabbiting on about, but her facial hair has really decreased its growth.

(O yes, the MtF is expected to do her RLT with no tits and a fully functioning beard, just as the FtM is expected to do it with breasts and menstrual flow but no beard or upper body strength.)

The Bit-ler’s additionally lucky that she works for an agency that has protocols in place to deal with transitioning employees – she knows she won’t lose her job.  AND . . .  remarkably, her colleagues weren’t content to sit quietly through the announcement of her transition, but after giving her a round of applause, have been proactively supportive of her.  She’ll probably live through her RLT.

And of course, she has me. 

You’d think the MtF’s wife would be a font of feminine wisdom, but the Bit-ler drew the short straw in that department.  I don’t cook.  Doing my hair = pulling it back in a scrunchy.  My fashion sense, according to my son, is various levels of plaid.  As to being quiet and decent, well . . .

And this isn’t helped by the Bit-ler’s periodic channelling of the Femininity Goddess – an Irish Mother Superior/Hyacinth Bucket entity who walks through our house, hands clasped, uttering phrases like, ‘How common, something I would never say, especially with the windows open.’ 

I’m sure the old lady next door has heard the phrase, ‘You fucking whore,’ before we moved in, but anyway . . .

While I’m not great at beauty or fashion tips, I do see in technicolour when the Bit-ler doesn’t act ‘female’ in a social setting.  As we discuss what women typically do in this or that situation, a little voice in the back of my head asks, ‘Why?  Why are women expected to be this way?’  I feel like I’m taking some great beautiful wild thing and trying to tame her.

The Bit-ler always sweeps my hesitation away – No, tell me, tell me what it is women do when they’re hither and yon, or inside places men are never permitted.  She has to know what the expectations are before she can decide to accept or reject them.

As I share this ancient lore, I wonder when I ate that lore-bait, hook, line and sinker, why I’m the type of woman who smiles and laughs and shares and endures. 

Three steps later, I wonder where my life went, that my mornings are spent curling her hair when I can’t be arsed to do my own.  That when I spend time considering why her outfit works or doesn’t, I’m wearing the Jack Skelton T-shirt my son gave me, over unflatteringly skinny jeans with dried mud from the garden and dog walks.  That I police her gender-appropriate social niceties and have given up screaming, ‘Fuck!’  At least when the windows are open.  That I live knowing someday someone will call me a lesbian and maybe treat me badly for it, and I’ll have to deal with that like a seasoned pro instead of someone who hasn’t a clue what lesbians have to suffer in order to live and love.

Wow, eh?

I don’t have answers to my questions, but I’m still willing to do this.  Mostly because I’m amazed at the Bit-ler strapping on her bra and marching out with her lemon-yellow shoulder bag to take on the world.  I’m a bit too selfish to deny myself the adventure, no matter how many outfits I have to pass judgement on.

But the questions are there.  I wonder if I’ll know sometime in the future, what I’ve put to the side so I can do this now.  I wonder if I’ll regret or be happy that I did. 

Let Me Tell You ‘Bout the Hair

It’s rather astounding, how powerful a woman’s hair is.  Before officially starting her real life test, the Bit-ler went to work with her B cup breasts and her somewhat androgynous women’s clothing.  She was never clocked as female or even gender fluid.  She was male, full stop. 

More than any other transition accoutrement, she needed hair.

Some trans women have their own luxurious locks; others get by with a bit of judicious styling.  The divide on the Bit-ler’s scalp could only be breached by the wigs she had, none of which fully satisfied her, all of which precluded being physically active.  The Bit-ler reconciled herself to a demure life. 

I, on the other hand, did not think beauty was a good swap for giving up my partner in crime, so I researched the whole thing and found out about hair systems that allow you to do sports and take showers and yes, even wear hats!

At this stage, I’m an enthusiastic, supportive hag. 

And so off to Edinburgh the Bit-ler goes to get a hirsute-ish pate.  I’m left in the new house with the fencing guys who’ve promised they can erect a barricade that’ll keep the Doodle in our garden.  A Doodle, I should add, who has already learned how to open the childproof door locks and escape the house.   Repeatedly.  With a big ol’ grin on her doggie face.

The fence guys themselves were civil enough.  The neighbours were a different matter.  We’d left the land of UKIP-pery and Mad Farmers to join the Uppity Nouveaux Riche too busy espousing capitalism to weed their rose beds.  New neighbours sensitive about property boundaries.  A sensitivity that extends into our garden, apparently.

By Day 2 of making bacon butties for the fencers and failed diplomacy with the neighbours – tasks previously the sole responsibility of the Bit-ler, as legislated by law and gender inequity – I’d redefined her trip north for hair as a luxury spa holiday that left me holding the can, an unappreciated Cinderella SOFFA.

Despite my self-pity, the fence got raised, no neighbours murdered in the process.  The Bit-ler came home looking the happiest I’d ever seen her.  It’d all been worth it.

Until the next day.  The Doodle’s early morning escape from our newly fenced garden required a run to the DIY shop.  Only, the Bit-ler had to get ready so she would pass.   Therein followed a long, drawn out prep that included visual demonstrations from myself.  Amazing, how complicated brushing your hair in a mirror really is.  Something second nature to little girls but that takes a while to master if your first attempt is as an adult. 

The next three days, Doodle found new escape routes, so three more trips to the DIY.  Three more preps by the Bit-ler while I twiddled my thumbs.   On that last trip, I was having trouble with the Sat-Nav.  The Bit-ler looked over just as we came into a curve.  The car drifted toward the centre line and she pulled it back before we crossed it.  I lost the plot. 

For me, losing the plot isn’t telling her she’s a feckin eejit who should keep her goddam eyes on the road.  Nope, losing the plot is taking a sample box from psychiatry’s diagnostic manual and giving her an assessment at 120 decibels.  A little knowledge with a lot of sharp edges.

She says nothing.  In her mind, she has to put up with an outburst like that because she considers me long suffering.

‘I wondered when I’d start shouting at you,’ I said.  A declaration of how long suffering I think I am. 

I eventually apologised like the alleged adult that I am.  The Bit-ler eventually agreed she didn’t have to take shit off me because I’m supportive.  But the first shot had been fired in what probably won’t end at a 21 gun salute to our old way of living.  Everything’s changed, from how long it takes to get ready to go, to what people perceive of our relationship.

And all because of her hair.

Caroline Paige Did It First

Caroline Paige

Last week, Caroline Paige didn’t get a Pride Power award.  Someone who did get an award, also got credit for Caroline’s achievement. 

Who is Caroline Paige?  The first RAF air crew and UK officer to transition while serving in the military.  How bad-ass is that?  A fast jet aviator coming out as trans in 1998 – before the military LGBT ban was removed.  After transition, she did eight helicopter deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pride Power indeed!

The Bit-ler asked around the military LGBT community for their reaction to Pride Power’s mistake.  People didn’t want to make a fuss.  The woman getting the award had done things.  Someone from the military would correct the mistake on the night.

No.  Feckin not good enough. 

So I contacted both Pride Power and the Guardian journalist who wrote First Trans RAF Pilot, The Remake.  Pride Power didn’t respond.  It was the day before the awards ceremony, so a bit late to change their minds.  The journalist, however, did tweet back to say that although she knew the woman getting the award wasn’t the first, she thought she was the first openly trans pilot.

Caroline Paige - look at them medals!

Okay.  Before Caroline, no one in the RAF had transitioned.  Caroline put 18 years of service at risk by telling her chain of command.  Once they agreed to let her transition on the job, there were people involved issuing her with female uniforms, changing her name and gender in their records, jerking her out of a cockpit and shoving her behind a desk because a girly couldn’t be flying to the front line.  Enough people involved that she got outed to the press.

How was her transition not open?  Because she didn’t self-promote?

Ten years ago when my son, El Punko transitioned, he said that the effort it took every day to be trans, left him with no energy to be an activist.  I told him that living his life was activism – the number of lives he touched, the trans and LGB, the SOFFA and totally unconnected. 

Obviously the LGBT community needs public activists – and yes, people who self-promote – in order to give the community visibility.  But any successful movement has to have a grassroots element.  One person meeting another person and changing an opinion, making a difference a thousand times over so the high profile, professional LGBT folk can have a splash-out with the media and give each other awards. 

I have no objection to that LGBT club of self-promotion, but don’t steal what’s due to someone like Caroline Paige.  The Bit-ler and all transfolk serving in the RAF now, have the option to accept awards or keep a low profile or walk somewhere in between because of Caroline.  Regardless of their own achievements, she was the first.    

Caroline Paige, first RAF pilot to openly transition

Edging Caroline Paige out of RAF history belittles her sacrifice and achievement, not to mention commits a despicable theft of her personal story and her public contribution.  Give that back to her.  Not as a mumbled aside in front of a room of people popping wine corks and taking selfies with celebrities.  Do it as publicly as you took it away from her.

Hey, and while you’re at it, give Caroline Paige an award.  She actually earned it.

Whar's Me Cookbooks?

So, Week 2 at the new place and the Bit-ler* can’t find her cookbooks, which means dinners are a little boring.   You see, Bit-ler won’t cook without a recipe, no matter how many times she’s made the dish before.  A woman of science, she is.  A veritable transgender Joe Friday.  Just the facts, ma’am.  Preferably in alphabetical order.

(*Butler in Transition)

45 minute stew that took me 2 hours to cook.

My mind works differently.  The few times Bit-ler’s relied on me to cook, I substituted ingredients willy-nilly, mostly because I didn’t recognise coconut milk or suet when I saw them in the pantry. 

My ease with improv makes me the one more likely to be the front guard to our adventures.  There aren’t always cheering crowds handing out water bottles to women who run the road to excitement.  As one of my neighbours once said to me, there shouldn’t be female pirates. 

A lurking Neanderthal?
(Monster by Diana Afanador)

But it’s often on the pedestrian path where we meet the Neanderthal.  Like the guy hired to replace the carpet Gargoyle Possum ruined  in the old place.  Carpet Guy did a visual calculation of the area, then started yelling at me for buying the wrong size carpet.  I said, ‘Shut it!’ and called in the Bit-ler who was still presenting as male.  Carpet Guy didn’t yell at her. 

Most girls learn by high school that having a locum phallus provides a social shorthand to dealing with patriarchal assholery.  But trans-women aren’t most girls.  Bit-ler has lived her life with male privilege, as well as being in a profession that automatically grants her authority, even in social situations.  So while I’m losing my penile wild card against knuckle-draggers, her status will cascade into lesser-dom, as soon as she gets the hair right.  And suddenly, her achievements don’t count, her worth won’t be assumed.

About ten years ago in the first year of his transition, my FtM son, El Punko was accosted by a drunk who wanted one of his cigarettes.  El Punko refused, the drunk got aggressive and chased El Punko into a shop.  Chances are, someone would’ve stepped in if the Punk were still presenting as female, but the bystanders who saw it, expected the young man to handle it himself.  El Punko dealt with his first school yard bully at age 20, not really a situation his mother could address by a visit to the head master.

Look behind you!
(Monster by Diana Afanador)

Bit-ler will be taking this on much later in life.  Although I know this is the way of the world, I don’t want her to learn it first hand, not after all she’s gone through to get a B-cup and a full head of hair.  Without a penis, even a borrowed one, we can’t expect the troglodytes to be civil. 

I don’t think there’s a cookbook in any of our boxes for this.

Best Laid Plans of Mice & Transitions

It seemed a reasonable idea.  Bit-ler (Butler-in-Transition) would do the handover of our old house as male, start in our new house as female.  There’d be a slight bleed through of maleness in the new house, but once two women were living there full time, the unnamed man would exit stage left.

Gargoyle Possum

We hadn’t factored in Gargoyle Possum.

A geriatric stray cat we naively rescued, blind in one eye, hair like a worn horse blanket.  He met our kindness with claws and teeth, a copious bladder flow & rampant sexual acts despite being neutered.  His propensity for vomiting on the table got him a trip to the vet who diagnosed a brain tumour.  Prognosis, eighteen months.  We were heartlessly relieved.

 

Like many stories of this sort, everyone adjusted, including the Gargoyle.  Once he stopped using us for blood-sport, he showed himself playful & incredibly intelligent, uniquely Possumy.  Cat piss & table vomit grew routine.  His eighteen months came & went.  He continued his nightly hump of the duvet. 

Garegoyle's favourite sleeping spot.

A few days before the move, he started that quiet withdrawal of a dying animal.  Though we’d taken him into our tribe as well as our house, we’d known from the beginning where he was headed.  Our reaction wasn’t coordinated or planned, but in the middle of digging up plants and packing boxes & taking down beds, we each sat with him, keeping the distance he requested, giving the witness he deserved.

I was 50 minutes away at the old house when it happened.  Bit-ler was inside the new house, at the mercy of agents documenting the number of nails in the walls.  El Punko & his equally old cat, the Toothless Wonder, were outside with the Gargoyle on the new front lawn, movers grunting past as if life never ended.    

Gargoyle opening his fan mail.

Gargoyle’s final grand mal seizure was a savage farewell to El Punko, but Gargoyle never minced around.  And though he was gone, his lungs kept breathing, his heart kept beating. 

We needed a vet.  

No phone reception.  No internet.  Bit-ler went to a neighbour for help.  

Gargoyle left us via lethal injection.  His legacy, outing the Bit-ler. 

The helpful neighbours have made several overtures to us, always when the Bit-ler is somewhere else.  And they always refer to the Bit-ler as male.  El Punko & I struggle to stay gender neutral.  Bit-ler laughs at our stories.

 

Life doesn't bend to best laid plans.  We’re left flying by the seat of our pants, no idea how our arrival as the local trans-family will be received.  At the moment, not caring.  It cost the Bit-ler too much to get here.  A few begrudgers won’t stop us.  And the thing about this transition business is, it surprises you, where your allies turn up.

Gargoyle Possum at play.

Thank you, Gargoyle Possum, for living long enough to teach us that.  Best of luck to you in your new humping grounds.