Category Archives: Transgender

Fairness and Other Myths

Published July 2, 2022 / by rmaddy / 1 Comment on Fairness and Other Myths
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I ran cross country with heart.  I never dogged a workout, and I pushed to the end every meet, not infrequently staggering or passing out as soon as I crossed the finish line.  One muddy race, I lost a shoe a half mile from the end and still eked out second place.  

Second place was my wheelhouse.  I never won a major competition.  Most days, I wasn’t even the best on my team.  Nevertheless, I scored well for my team every single race, and we made it to States during my high school senior year.  I was far more proud of that than of the academic record for which I was much better known.  I worked hard at my sport, and though I barely cracked the top 50 in my state, I think that I managed to be the best runner that I could be.

In my midfifties now, I know that I will probably never race again. Part of is is purely physical—the pounding of pavement extracts a price, and I ran for decades. I find it harder to run at all, let alone push myself for the speed that I once enjoyed. Beyond that, however, I am restrained by the realization that should I run competitively, the next price I paid might be far worse than the aches and pains.

America celebrated Pride 2022 by writing, copying and pasting bills to degrade and demonize transgender people. 35 states proposed anti-trans legislation in the first half of the year. Having failed for the most part a few years back to codify where trans folk can use the bathroom, Republicans are doubling down, finding in anti-trans issues more gasoline to pour on the fires of the culture war.

Their favorite flavor this year is the prohibition of transgender participation in athletics. The gambit is not new, but this year they have found willing accomplices in athletic associations, well-amplified pundits and even among LGBT notables. The formula, “I am (insert queer identity) here, and I don’t think transgender women should…” flows directly and profusely to op-ed pages and online news outlets.

Nobody medically transitions to win a medal, and nobody emerges through medical transition unchanged. And, despite assertions to the contrary, no spate of domination of athletics at any level by transgender women can be demonstrated. One person’s good performance does not a pattern make. Sometimes a good athlete transitions and continues to be a good athlete. Most of the time, I suspect, they do not. When they do, I would think it something to celebrate.

I personally began the process in relatively good shape, knocking out 8 minute mile splits for an hour or more at a time on the treadmill. Within 6 months, those splits had lengthened to about 11 minutes. Would I be exactly as good a runner in my new demographic as in my old? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t really matter, or at least that it shouldn’t.

“It’s about fairness”, goes the swindle. Incumbent in this notion is the idea that one person can deserve to win an event more than someone else, piled on top of the idea—so strenuously denied—that whether one wins or loses really does matter more than how one plays the game. Anyone who has ever waited for the gun on the starting line of a 10k knows that almost everyone participating will not win, but, I still dare to hope, that it is worth running anyway.

On Bravery

Published April 2, 2020 / by rmaddy / 2 Comments on On Bravery
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It’s happening again.

I first encountered the phenomenon during the early days of transition–basically once people were starting to notice and process the changes that they were seeing in my appearance.  I refer to the ascription of emotions to those going through an unusual process.  The two most commonly mentioned in that case were happiness, as in “I’m glad you’re happy”, or “As long as as you’re happy,” and bravery–“You are so brave!”  That I felt neither in those moments often seemed not to register.

“Happiness” missed the cut in the face of Covid19, but once again I hear with some frequency how brave I am, how brave my co-workers are.  I cannot speak for them, but I know that I did not feel brave in transition, and I do not feel brave now.  

Truth be told, I live with anxiety, and it was not improved either by gender transition or the current pandemic.  Those who experience it know that it can be managed more or less effectively, but it tends to persist lifelong, sharing more commonality in that sense with chronic conditions–heart disease, hypertension, diabetes–than the acute but transitory distress of a broken arm.  I do give myself some credit for doing relatively well under the circumstances–continuing to work and thrive in a broad sense, maintain a disciplined connection to the resources necessary to do so, and becoming, on balance, more adept at managing the day-to-day stress.  If I linger to write my autobiography, I fancy that the subtitle will read something like “My Life as a Well-Coiled Spring”.

I suspect that the attribution of bravery, at least in my case, owes to a lack of familiarity on the part of the observer.  Most people have no idea what it is like to experience an identity not conferred upon them by society or biology or both, and understandably feel a bit flummoxed by seeing someone act decisively in the face of such experience–just as I might wonder at the oft-cast image of a soldier in a movie grabbing a nothing more lethal than a flag and charging headlong at an entrenched, well-armed opponent.  Inspirational, yes, but not just a tiny bit crazy.  Lest any other person, particularly my transgender brothers and sisters bristle at such a word, let me propose that “audacity” is a probably a more apt description, and remind that I am speaking merely of my own odyssey.  So too the plight of the present-day healthcare worker, watching the merciless eruption of a deadly epidemic, wondering not whether but when, as the news is framed, “needs will surpass resources.”  Why would the general public know what that is going to look like when from the inside I barely grasp it myself?

At any rate, suddenly I am brave again.  I find myself in a situation over which I have little control, no genuinely good choices, and ample reason to expect a miserable outcome.  I do my job knowing that it is my job to do.  I desperately need my family, but fear becoming the vector that silently, invisibly, brings the pestilence home.  Aragorn’s “Not this day” speech at the Black Gate bubbles up from somewhere in my subconscious, bringing with it both a flood of both tears and welcome inspiration, but so too does the image of the soldier at Dunkirk dropping his weapons and walking into the waves.  I know which figure I more closely resemble.  

“Superheroes”, a New York Times editorial called us today, although to be fair, the author made largely the same point that I am.  I wonder–is it audacity to set my feet against an onslaught requiring more people, more protection, more resources that I have on hand, or just plain crazy?  Will my training, experience and well-honed sense of moral duty be sufficient to hold back the relentless tide of anxiety and despair?  The only way to know is to pass through, and I don’t want to.  Would that we could linger forever in these last moments when normality is still at least a vivid, recent memory.

No, I am not brave, but perhaps it is not mine to say.  One could posit that bravery is a word which must be externally applied–an observed quality as opposed to an experienced internal state.  Countless are the times I have heard a parent or a healthcare worker tell a frightened child how brave they are while getting their blood drawn, getting a vaccine or some other immediately unpleasant intervention.  Has that not always felt like the right thing to say?

Maybe we celebrate phantom bravery because it is comforting, or simply more comfortable to do so.  It is hard enough to see one person in distress; harder still for that distress to spread like contagion to those around.  Let there instead be bravery, and heroines, and hope, for so long as there is, the story still seems worth telling.

Land of the Free, Home of the Obtuse

Published November 13, 2018 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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I began my transition from a position of ignorance.  I was largely disconnected from the transgender community, had not read much from the increasingly rich corpus of trans memoirs and academic writings, and most of all, didn’t know where the hell I was going.  In the past decade I addressed and erased these deficiencies, and I report to you today, among other things, that all has worked out, more or less.1

We all start from a position of ignorance.  Human beings are blank checks of possibility.  We do not know, perhaps, the total balance against which we can draw, but it falls to us to continually fill in the recipients and amounts until the damn things (inevitably, I’m afraid) start bouncing.  Ignorance as a starting place, is not a problem.

Ignorance as a way of life, however…

I infer from the fact that, having read this far, you accept certain propositions.  First, you know that despite the fact that making sweeping assumptions about who people are on the basis of visible/audible characteristics that you perceive often works, it only works up to a point, rather than every time you do it. Since you make such assumptions with minimal conscious effort every day in regards to dozens of people, your assumptions will occasionally  be wrong, requiring you to adjust them on the basis of information subsequently acquired.  Second, you realize that you know almost nothing of the thought life of the people you think you know, and that pretty much everything you actually do know owes to what they say and/or what they do.

Easy-peasy so far, right?  The rest of this post depends on you synthesizing a conclusion out of what you have already accepted.  That conclusion is this:  that your perceptions of the gender of other people is reflexive, shallow, peripheral and effortless, while their perceptions of their own gender is experiential, deep, central and crucial.  Otherwise put, our half-assed, knee-jerk judgments about the gender of others are less accurate than, and trumped by, the gender that they experience internally.  

Yes, we are going to talk about pronouns and names again, but first I need to tell you a story.

In the spring of 2017, my wife, son and I took a brief vacation to West Texas.  The destination satisfied the annual need to escape the hopelessness of lingering winter in Minnesota, and offered further opportunity for some sorely-needed political catharsis.  Specifically, I wanted to take in the beauty of our nation’s natural southern border before some asshole tried to cover it over with concrete and barbed wire.  The trip was glorious, made even more so by the chance to spend a couple of days with a long-lost friend from high school, who parenthetically had, like me, changed her first name since we last met.

As a transgender person, I know that being misnamed is at least distracting, and often painful.  I also knew that if I let my thoughts run on auto-pilot, I would almost certainly misname her.  Auto-pilot, therefore, was not an acceptable option.  50 miles away from her home, on approach, I started to say her name over and over:  “Hello, Marlys.  Hey Marlys!  Yo…Marlys.”  I did this both silently and audibly.  Of course, I had already accepted her new name when she re-introduced herself to me months earlier.  It was, after all, her name, and she had no reason to be mistaken about it.

I think the strategy worked.  The reason I think that is because, throughout our renewed friendship, I always identify her in my thoughts by her new name.  Somewhere back in the brambles of my psyche, I know that she once had another, but unless I write a piece like this, I tend to forget what it was.  She is Marlys.  She told me so herself.  Good enough for me.

I once believed that hoping to be named and/or pronouned correctly by friends, family and strangers was too big of an ask.  I adopted a strategy of never correcting my patients and their visitors.  I concluded—after years of frustration—that it was far too difficult for older people, or those who had known me longer to make adjustments and resolved to just try to take their persistent misgenderings in stride.  I remembered that I too had made misnamed and misgendered others on occasion, mentally downplaying the conscious efforts I subsequently made to rewrite my memories—in the manner exemplified in the Marlys snippet—about those I had so offended.  I could not expect people to make such an effort on behalf of transgender people in general, let alone me specifically.

Then I went to France.

When out and about at home, whether socially or at work, I generally expect to be misgendered 10-15 times per day.  Most of the time, those who misgendered me tend to do so continuously, whether or not I correct them, or if they hear the correct name and pronouns from my work associates.  In France I was misgendered once over the period of two weeks.  The woman who did so apologized, looking somewhat chagrined in the process,  and did not repeat the mistake going forward.

How did France get right what my homeland so consistently gets wrong?  The possibilities:

  1.  I heard wrong.  Maybe I was too distracted by the sights and sounds to notice what usually feels, emotionally, like being whacked with a stick.  The thing is, they spoke English to us most of the time, and when they spoke French, phrases were always punctuated, without guidance from me, with the polite “Madame’s”.
  2. Their language makes gendering easier.  After all, French, like all Latin-derived languages, is structually gendered to a far greater degree than English.  Every object is a him or a her, not an it and every adjective and verb associated with the object follows suit.  “This table—she is beautiful.”  “This wine—he is sour.” In French, even the word this would have to be either masculine or feminine, and the adjectives change spelling, sometimes dramatically.  Perhaps the language does ingrain a sense of importance toward the task of properly labeling, but this in itself would tend to point out that they consistently labeled me as female.  Incidentally, the Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, and Argentinians with whom we broke bread over the two week interval also did so, despite the fact that only the Argentinians would have a linguistic cue to do so.
  3. They culturally accept transgender identity as valid in a way that Americans simply do not.  I’m not going to lie.  I’m betting all of my chips on this one.  

Despite my frustration that misgendering is a fact of my day to day life, and that transgender people are transparently being used as pawns in the raging culture war, I do see some occasional signs of progress.  For example, I have abandoned my previous conclusions that older people cannot get gender right.2. Though still more the exception than the rule, I get correctly gendered by people of all ages and essentially 100% of the time by those employed in customer service.3. Many of you have already updated your thinking.

Nevertheless, I still have ample occasion to cringe when, even as strangers increasingly address me as feminine, some of my closest associates and family—sometimes in the same conversation—continue to refer to me as he, him, etc, almost as if it were their job to correct the person who got it right.  I don’t necessarily assume that this is an intentional thought, but the confusion on the part of the person who just met me is instantly apparent.

I’m tired of making allowances for intention.  Maybe you didn’t intend to call me “him.”  The larger, more salient fact, is that intention has nothing to do with how you speak to me or about me—intention implies both effort and ownership—and that fact in and of itself hurts like hell, especially years down the road with no apparent end in sight.  And, if you really do just accidentantally slip up in a moment of distraction, apologize, for fuck’s sake, and start acting like the problem is yours, not mine.  It is.

Perhaps you find yourself thinking, “It is hard to remember what so-and-so, wants to be called now.”  And so it is.  This is because you are quitting after the word “hard”, ignoring the words “want” and “now”, and what they imply—that you still think you know who I really am, whereas I am deluded on that point.  Read that last sentence again, and understand that I, and most trans folk, hear the message loud and clear.

I wish I could tell you what it feels like.  The closest I can get is another story:

Imagine you meet a childhood friend and have a lovely conversation, reminiscing about old times.  As they leave, they call you the name of another of your old playmates, and it dawns on you that they genuinely thought that’s who you were.  Your companion remembers a moment of shared experience, but the fact that they have forgotten who you are in the story leaves you feeling a little empty.

Multiply by 70 and repeat 10x daily.  Or, better yet, recognize the limits of your ability to make casual inferences about who people are, and listen instead to what they tell you.


FFS

Published September 26, 2017 / by rmaddy / 5 Comments on FFS
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Image credit David Tenant, Hamlet, 2009

 

The arc of a ball through the air can be described mathematically.  For each fraction of a second, the ball approaches you at a certain rate, drops slightly due to gravity and perhaps curves in one direction or another due to spin.  In a second, the ball moves so far.  In a half second, less.  It is possible to consider smaller and smaller increments of time.  In fact, if you consider an instant, an infinitesimally small increment of time, you may still describe the position and motion in that moment.  To do so requires a branch of mathematics known as calculus.  Odds are, you don’t understand calculus.  Nevertheless, through practice and experience you catch the ball.  Your brain gets calculus even when you don’t.

Something parallel happens regarding gender.  The senses give input to the brain which turns this information subconsciously into complex ratios and estimates of probability.  Men tend to be taller than women, but height alone does not distinguish between them.  Similarly, women tend to speak in a higher pitch, but there is sufficient overlap that pitch alone does not reliably allow for gender recognition.  At any given moment, nearly instantaneously, we measure thousands of parameters in order to classify our human companions with regards to gender.  Most of the time, we are unaware that we are doing it.  In fact, if we try to consciously measure and process data in order to make a gender determination, we suddenly get very, very bad at it.  Our brains are really good at making gender determinations that cannot easily be made if we set our attention to it.

Consider the face.  You recognize the difference between male and female faces, but if asked why you think a face is male or female, you either draw a blank or tend to mention things (shape, for example) that are not particularly potent predictors of gender.  At any given moment your eyes are picking up subtle details and your brain uses this information to calculate ratios which you have probably never considered.  There are nearly 4 billion male and 4 billion female faces on the planet.  They are so unique that even genetically identical twins can be recognized by close contacts.  Somehow, your brain recognizes them as male or female, familiar or unfamiliar and may instantly assign a biographical file to a face before you have a moment to think of it.  And, to today’s topic, you assign gender to a face almost instantaneously, despite the fact that there are four billion men’s faces that don’t look all that alike and four billion women’s faces with the same degree of variance.

Certain patterns tend to hold.  Women on average have smaller heads with smaller features.  The male hairline is a relatively higher “M” to the female’s upside down “U”.  The male forehead slants backward subtly compared to the relatively vertical female counterpart.  The female mandible is narrower, culminating in a somewhat more v-shaped chin.  The male nose to lip distance tends to be longer.  Without even considering the relatively obvious marker of facial hair, there are patterns and ratios which, taken together, help to form a gender impression.

I write today five days post facial feminization surgery,1 still a bit bruised and sore from 6 hours under anesthesia during which dozens of millimeter scale adjustments were made to my features.  When next we meet, you will still recognize me, but your brain will tend to classify me differently.  Some of the changes (higher brow, smaller nose) will already be present, whereas some (lower hairline, narrower chin) may take six months or more to settle.  Although most people have never heard of it, FFS is often the surgery most coveted by male to female (MTF) transsexuals.  It is expensive, painful, and unlike GCS, aka “The Operation,” impactful in day to day social interactions.

Unfortunately, it is also widely considered to be purely cosmetic and elective.  Insurance rarely picks up the tab, and it can run anywhere from $15,000-$50,000 depending on what is done, by whom and in what facility.  Personally, I opted for a fairly limited course, concentrating on the upper part of the face, particularly the forehead, which seems to play a crucial role in how the brain processes gender.  Most transwomen never get the opportunity.  I write this fully cognizant that I am a woman of great privilege.

I also had the procedure done in a local office, which given the length and intensity of the surgery was not the sort of caution I would have preferred, but I am not immune to the economic argument.  And, I seemed to have escaped death, for at least the period of time that I would likely have been hospitalized elsewhere.  It is not my intention to review here the care of my surgeon, but Kathy and I were drawn to him for his reassuring demeanor, his thoughtful listening, his artistic eye and ultimately, his training in complex craniofacial procedures.  I appear to have won the bet, and saved thousands over what the same care would have cost in my hospital system, which as I mentioned, wouldn’t financially support it anyway.

The bruises and swelling are still too extensive to permit much of a look, but I like what I can see.  Mostly, I see my eyes, but the way I think they were meant to look.  The pain is intense, but I was never particularly afraid of that–a few butterflies the day before at most.  My biggest fear was that I would wake up with regret, thinking that I had made some sort of a mistake.  I don’t.  Not one bit.

I hope that my surgery will help you to see me differently, but ultimately it was more about greeting the person I see in the mirror each morning.  I want, in the words once given to me by my friend Anne, to feel at home inside my skin.  Time will tell, but the deed is now done, I am convalescing, and I am feeling very grateful.  I do hope that you will not think me vain.  I am of course, but it’s still uncharitable to think that.  This fixes for me something that was existentially broken for 50 years.

Perhaps my new lines will persuade your brain to accept my femininity.  Nevertheless, I remain ever hopeful that you will accept it for the best reason of all…because I asked.

Sweet Anonymity

Published July 10, 2017 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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It’s the closest thing to a high holy day for me these days, not that this is saying much.  I don’t have much use for the concept of holiness anymore, with its haughty sense of untouchability, distance and separateness.  Are you apt to swear by “all that is holy”?  Name-dropping of the highest order, IMO.  Perhaps we ought to swear by more verifiable commodities like the greenness of grass, the jerk in accounting or Amazon Prime.™ But I digress…

The (un)holiday to which I refer is, of course, Pride, which also stretches the definition of holiday by extending for the entire month of June.  Practically speaking, though, it amounts (in Minnesota anyway) to a two-day festival of which the most popular event is a roughly half-mile parade down Hennepin Avenue.  Depending on the mood of the LGBT community and the weather, it can be a raucous affair indeed, drawing hundreds of thousands of people.  In 2013, the parade came on the heels of the legalization of same sex marriage.  I remember stepping out into the street at the end, and being one of a somewhat tall disposition, I was able to look far up and down the street, revealing a sea of people that simply dwarfed the crowd of a large stadium, decked out, for the most part in epic rainbow.  Last year, a similar number gathered, yet palpably in the shadow of Orlando.

This year, clouds and wind better suited for late-April provided a tangible reminder of turbulent times.  Stung by the acquittal of a police officer who gunned down a man for calmly complying with instructions to produce a driver’s license, we were forced to reconsider the role of the police our festivities.  Those of us more recent to the festivities have typically experienced  the police as a benign presence at Pride, marching alongside us and dispensing a seemingly limitless supply of smiles.  Still, we recall that Pride started at Stonewall, a direct result of systematic discrimination and police violence, particularly against transwomen of color.  Polite applause greeted a cadre of protesters claiming to represent Black Lives Matter.  Nevertheless, viewers in my immediate vicinity expressed frustration as the parade stalled for more than 60 minutes.

By the time the parade resumed, I was freezing, despite having layered up.  Dykes on Bikes led the procession as always with a roar, producing the usual response of thunderous applause.  The various flags were next.  As the transgender flag passed by, I saw a chance to warm up.  I walked out into the street, grabbed a handle, and marched the rest of the way to Loring Park.

From then on, it was business as usual, as in Target, Delta, Best Buy, health organizations (including those that still deny transgender benefits) and dozens of churches.  I got my 30,000 steps in.  I ate corn dogs and gyros.  I kissed a daschund.  I kept hoping for some great random conversation, but mostly I just made small talk with the various shopkeepers.  Whether there were more present this year or not, police seemed to be ever present, most of them grinning from ear to ear and many with dogs.  And why not?  Pride is always crawling with canines.  I regret that Scooter did not make the trek this year as he has in the past.  Most of all, I reveled in the annual opportunity to walk around and garner no reaction whatsoever.  Sweet anonymity!

I meant to post this summary before June slipped away, but better late than never.  Belated Happy Pride to my readers, who sometime within the past few months hit my pages for the 10,000th time.  I am honored by your clicks and comments.  I do apologize for the slacking pace of this blog.  Chalk it up to a combination of things–at some point one feels that there is very little to say, and at some point the desire to recount my transitional thinking starts to feel like performance art.  I intend to continue writing, but a growing impulse for privacy is competing with my desire to disclose, slowing me down somewhat.  Until next time…

 

Dunsinane. Within the Castle.

Published April 18, 2017 / by rmaddy / 1 Comment on Dunsinane. Within the Castle.
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His elbow caught me more or less in the center of my abdomen.  Instantly, accident scene reconstruction commenced.

Option #1.  I walked into somebody.  Sure.  I do this, particularly but not exclusively when I am lost in thought.1 Ordinarily my well-honed reflex to beg pardon would engage at this point, but paradoxically the moment of contact found me unusually dedicated to interpersonal spacing.  Specifically, I had chosen an opening at the luggage carousel where I would have the best chance of extracting my heavy ass suitcase without risk of jostling or be jostled.  The elbow did not compute.  My brain sought more information.  It came as I made eye contact with the other party and noted that rather than registering the expected surprise, he was smiling.

Option #2.  I must know this person.  Memories of past chance encounters in the airport begin to percolate towards the surface, only to be superseded by the frantic urgency of identifying the face before me.  This is not a talent for which I am recognized.  I feel a bit queasy, whether from the potential embarrassment of being recognized without recognizing or an increasing insistence by my usually passive abdominal wall that I suddenly pay attention to it.

He is short.  Slightly built.  Blond.  Roughly twenty-five.  The only friends I have in this age group are musicians and wannabes.   A patient perhaps…then why the touchy-feely familiarity?  A co-worker’s spouse?  Dammit.  No match.

The encounter approaches the ripe old age of four seconds.  He starts circling to my left, eyes locked, smile shifting ever so slightly into a display of teeth, holding a distance of 20-25 feet. I recall the elementary school playground and those TV specials about hyenas.  Option #3 begins to take shape.

I voice it first as a question:  “Oh my God…did he just hit me?”  My subconscious runs with this, and starts laying the groundwork for a shift from “What?” to “Why?”  It will have precious little time to proceed.  He is about to speak, thereby signaling the end of the internal inquisition.

“Good luck with the operation.“

He continued to my left, and while I considered whether to believe my ears, he repeated it, so as to register his preference that I do.  Well, thanks…I suppose…although I didn’t recall bringing it up.

That’s as far as the story goes.  If the dissection of my thoughts seems overly detailed, it is only because there is nothing else to report.  In striking me in the center of my spare tire, he chose the one target where he was least likely to do much damage, his elbow bouncing harmlessly away like a pebble on the roadway.  Parenthetically, this happened not in the ruby red state of Texas, from which I had presently returned,2 but in brilliantly purple Minnesota.

I don’t know what impression will linger in the months to come, but the early verdict is that I had no good options.  Whereas my youthful self was directly and indirectly trained to resist a bully, it now occurs to me that most often resistance really is futile.  I am aging and recently, quite achy.  My size no longer protects; it only identifies me as a target.   I have also acquired just enough wisdom to know that answering petty violence with more petty violence would put me on level with this little cretin.  There was nothing whatsoever but to wait for the end of the scene.

I offer this story with no moral attached unless it is that shit happens.  I’ll brood, and verbally process and move on.  Eventually something else like this will happen and I’ll go right back to Square Fucking One.  Repeat until you can’t.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

 

Check the Math

Published January 10, 2017 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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[There are] lies, damned lies and statistics.  –Mark Twain

It will not surprise you to hear that I follow a number of transgender news feeds.  Staying abreast of happenings within one’s broader demographic requires some discipline, particularly when one’s “broader demographic” is rather narrow.

As with news in general, transgender news reads a bit dark.  Violence makes good television, at least if ratings are any clue.  Following this trend, it has become increasingly common for transgender murders to be not only reported, but counted, as in, “This marks the ___th murder of a transgender person this year.”  The final tally last year, according to The Advocate, was 27.

I understand what The Advocate and others are trying to do.  Shining a light on anti-transgender violence is part of the process of curtailing it.  Further, each death represents a grim loss–first and foremost for the individual, then outward to their families, friends and society in general.  I applaud that they are individually remembered and lamented.  I feel their deaths somewhat more closely than the average murder because I identify with the class struggle which often lies beneath it.

But let us not too quickly get lost in the numbers or gloss over ridiculous phrases such as “the average murder”.  The reason that some of you might not have choked on these words the first time I used them owes largely, in my opinion, to the fact that murder is anything but rare.  In 2015, there were 16,000 murders in the USA, and by all accounts the final numbers for 2016 look to be higher.

Each one of the victims reflects an epidemic of violence that we, as a nation, have done little if anything to address.  Indeed, we tend societally to respond to rampant violence by buying guns, a remedy which has been proven to double the likelihood of being murdered and triple the chances of dying by suicide.  Of course those stats don’t apply to us, right?

Let’s do the numbers:  27 transgender murders.  16000 total.  This means that, if reported accurately, transgender people, who represent perhaps 0.3% of the population, account for less than 0.2% of US murder victims.  The problem isn’t necessarily that we have a transgender violence problem specifically, but rather that we have a violence problem in general.

By all means, let us mourn and remember the dead, not just as numbers, but as individuals bursting with unrealized promise and potential.  Let us feel the outrage inherent in the fact that someone was killed for being who they are.  Nevertheless, let’s not get too parochial about it:  Trans people really are killed for being trans, but likewise children are killed because they are children.  Women are killed because they are women.  The poor are killed because they are poor.  Murder is the ultimate affront to egalitarianism.  Somehow, somewhere, someone was deemed to be expendable.

That.  Let’s stop that.

 

Unfinished Business

Published December 9, 2016 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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Occasionally a patient or family member will call the ER to say that they are on their way in to see us.  Similarly, radio traffic alerts us to the dispatch of ambulances in the surrounding communities.  I refer to potential patients not yet within our walls as “lurkers”.  Thus, when asked if I am busy, I might respond, “3 here, 2 lurking.”  The lurking patient has already entered into my problem-solving calculus, and perhaps not in the manner you might expect:  lurkers count double.1

Why, you might ask, should this be the case?  Is not a bird in the hand worth two in the bush?  Quite the opposite, as far as I am concerned.  There are many words that might be used to describe what I do at work:  diagnostician, comforter, risk manager, explainer, and so forth.  In order for me to be an Emergency Physician, however, something else must be in the mix.  I am someone who finishes shit.  I meet people, enter into their dilemma and, to whatever extent possible, solve the problem.  At the very least, I figure out how it is going to be solved.  Quickly.  Perhaps you have a physician who knows you like a neighbor and who will walk with you through decades of sickness and health.  That’s not me.  I’m the one who checks out at 7:30.  I do as much as I can as well as I can, then I go home.  I am a specialist of the first hour, sifting through the problems of the day and always trying to be maximally prepared and available for the next bad thing that happens.  You need me to have such an outlook–the next disaster might befall you, and you will want my full attention at that time.

A lurker is a person I cannot yet help, a problem I can not yet solve.  If the lurker would kindly arrive, then we might make some progress together.  A job begun really is half done, as far as I am concerned.2  Until then, I have unfinished business.

I dislike unfinished business.  I paid off my 30 year mortgage in 12.  Don’t ask me to pledge x number of dollars for every mile you walk.  Tell me rather how much you want and how I can complete the transaction online right now.  No, I’m not interested in a wine-of-the-month club, and hell yeah–I belong to Amazon Prime.

By now you’ve guessed the segue, and if it sounds familiar, I think it is because I have riffed on it before:  transition is seemingly endless.  Whether it is actually endless, I cannot say.  I have met plenty of people that speak of completing transition in such and such a year, but the very fact that I have met them usually owes to their presence in transgender support groups.  Maybe they are Bodhisattvas, remaining among the transitioning to help us along our way.  Following that analogy, though, I wonder if transition, like enlightenment, is more something that you habitually do than a place you arrive.3  Use it or lose it.

But oh, how I hope it is a destination!  I even know what it would look like:  a state of happiness and coherence.  In this respect my goals are not much different than those of anybody else.  It doesn’t really matter how one gets there, so long as one gets there.  If the journey  itself is the reward, however, then I could end up nearly anywhere.  One can get in decent shape even by running after nothing, but in line with my introduction, I have always proceeded under the assumption that the point of a race is to break the tape at the end.

There you have it–a perfect recipe for my restlessness and a plausible explanation for why I intermittently flip out.  For me, there is not a reliable degree of joy in the journey, only the sense of not having arrived.  A friend of mine bears a tattoo stating, in oriental script, “Not all who wander are lost,”4 but I secretly suspect a healthy percentage actually are.  I certainly am.  This is hard…really hard, and I don’t know if I’ll ever, as the Scots say, “Get on wi’ ae.”

I believe people who say they have completed transition.  They own their stories, just as I own mine.  The sense I have gotten from speaking to several who have said so and from reading the blogs of others though is that they are referring very specifically to gender confirmation surgery (GCS), i.e. when they had their fun bits rearranged.  This is certainly understandable, since society in general thinks is what transition means.  Apparently, at least for some,  this really can be the end of the road.  The tricky part is that we are all on different roads and I don’t think we can infer too much from the experience of others.  The end of my road, you recall, is primarily defined by a mental state–happiness and coherence.  There doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that these things follow surgical transition.  The people I know post-GCS appear to fill a broad spectrum between happy and miserable.  Having major surgery because someone else said it helped them is flawed process.5

I experience transition as a mental phenomenon.  It is in my mind that I envision happiness/coherence and in my mind that I suffer its absence.  When you ask me how I feel, I think I can safely assume that you refer to my mental state, not my genitals.6  I publish my story largely to help me “think things through”–now there is a metaphor–hoping along the way to help the next transgender person do the same.  When I blew an emotional circuit breaker last month, I called my psychiatrist, not my endocrinologist.  It is in my mind where my demons lurk7, and it is there that I go to fight them.

I was raised this way, taught that my mind would “take me far.”  In some sense, it has, and yet I recognize that my religious upbringing thoroughly stigmatized “the flesh” as corrupt.  I often wish that I had recognized myself as transgender when I was younger, but I don’t see how that would have been possible.  I didn’t have the tools.  Speaking to another issue, but with great eloquence, my sister once remarked, “We were raised without bodies.”  She has since found hers back but I am still looking.

I have moved on, but I still tend to forget that the mind/body dichotomy is a metaphor.  It is often a useful metaphor, but metaphors have their limits.  We ought not to eat the menu.   Humans do not think, octopus-style, with their arms, but the brain is nevertheless thoroughly embodied.  When I deal with depression, I experience physical pain in my upper abdomen strong enough to wake me from sleep.  In my summary of a year on estrogen, I recounted what I was hoping it would do to my mind, and how surprised I was by how quickly it was messing with my body and that the things it was doing to my body were affecting my mind.  Well, duh…I need to stop being shocked by the obvious.  The term transgender would be meaningless if I had no body.

I have a body.  It’s that tall thing that glares at me from the other side of the mirror, every damned time I look.  It knows that I don’t like it and I can tell that the feeling is mutual.  Lately, just to piss me off further, it has been getting older.  Perhaps someday we will call a truce, but for now, we scowl at each other like old enemies, each demanding that the other surrender.

Unfinished business.

 

 

There are no happy endings.
Endings are the saddest part, 
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.

Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

Footnotes

This or That?

Published December 5, 2016 / by rmaddy / Leave a Comment
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My name is Renae Gage1 and I am a binary thinker.

If I was ever anything else, it was far away and long ago, lost even to memory.  Not 100% of the time of course.  It do hate peas and carrots more or less equally, and I observe that some folk really are a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.  Nevertheless, binary thinking is my tragic flaw, the pit into which I regularly fall.  “As a dog returns to its vomit,” offers the scriptures, “so fools repeat their folly.”

Speaking of which, I blame religious indoctrination for this rut in my thinking.  I was raised on Heaven and Hell, good and evil, darkness and light, blessings and curses.  The stripe of Christianity which I was force-fed does not do nuance well.  Whether this only amplified some innate tendency within me or produced it out of whole cloth, my reflexes are honed to a razor’s edge.  Where others see similarity, I see difference.  My contrast knob 2 is dialed to the maximum.

The fact that I have rejected the crucible in which I was fired is of no consequence–the pattern is etched in my brain, and there isn’t a hell of a lot I can do about it.  In fact, the manner in which I extracted myself from religion looks just as binary–some people just file their faith on a dusty back shelf and ignore it.  I sent mine packing, barred the doors and secured a restraining order lest it ever contemplate a return.

Being a binary thinker is a serious bummer as a transgender person.  It has taken a Herculean effort for me to understand, for example, gender as a spectrum or, even more, as a social construction.  To be sure, I understand it up here, but not so much in here.   Note to self:  add head/heart to my list of artificial binaries.

It seems that the difficulty is primarily internal.  I have friends who reject gender completely and I think I am able to take their assertions at face value.  Nor would I think any less of another trans person who told me that they don’t fit neatly into the boy or the girl box.  I thoroughly accept that people are, so long as they are honest, exactly who they say they are.

For me, however, the binary tyrant lives.  I am unable to shrug at my variance.  Every day, I run into people who are ostensibly 100% male or 100% female with the singular exception of my morning encounter with the mirror.  I can opine until I am ROYGBIV3 in the face about gender as a spectrum, but waiting for me around every corner are two little boxes labeled “M” and “F”.

Nor is it just me, society.  I hear your “Good night, ladies.  Good night, Renae.”  I feel your hand-crushing handshakes and bro hugs.  I notice the angle of your lip when you stare at me in the checkout line.  Nevertheless, I recognize the steep discount I am getting.  In some places, the price is much, much higher.

I don’t believe in a world without gender.  I don’t feel genderless.  I feel feminine.  While the younger generations may be starting to chip away at the moulds, most of us were already hardened in them.  I’m told that I need to let go of the binary.  What if I can’t?  What if this also is simply something that is?

I’ve had the privilege of meeting more and more trans people.  Some are happy and others not so much.  Almost none of them are “embracing the broader gender continuum”.  To an individual, they all seem to be crawling into the “other box” and closing the lid.  The ones who fit in the box better seem to be happier.  Maybe that’s all you can do.  You can’t beat everybody.

Into the darkness

Published November 18, 2016 / by rmaddy / 6 Comments on Into the darkness
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The first storm of winter is upon us.  The early indications predict that we will escape the heavy snow this time, but we have already been treated to gusting winds, steeply dropping temperatures and some sort of snow/sleet/hail thingie that didn’t do any damage, but produced an absolutely deafening roar on my windshield as I headed into work this morning.  Twas the witch of November come stealin’, as the prophet Gordon1 once intoned.

As much as I hate winter, I love a good storm.  Any storm.  I love “sheltering in place,” as they say, looking across the hills and fields out the back (southwest) windows of my home.  I don’t cower in the basement.  I grab a camera.  I step out of the front door to welcome the arrival of the new wind, to take in its measure and flavor.  In my formative years, I loved to go for a run during the height of a downpour, especially when the streetlights were knocked out.2  Like Lieutenant Dan, I climb to the top of the proverbial mast and taunt the sky:  “Is that all you’ve got?”

But not all storms are weather.

There are other kinds of storms which terrify me.  They paralyze–stunning me with a dizzying barrage of emotional lightening and pounding me with the thunder of confusion.  The very foundations of my life erode and I cascade downstream into Mare Crisium–the Sea of Crisis.3  It is there that, for the last several weeks, I have been treading water, at times with some success, but occasionally sinking beneath the waves of doubt.

Enough with the metaphor?  I suppose, but then again, you have never known me to be a particularly linear writer, and, as I have found myself saying more than once recently, I am not at my best.

I prefer to narrate the storm from the relative safety of its aftermath.  “Hey, things got bad, but look at all the nifty rainbows now!”4  I seem to be okay with vulnerability, but usual only with a certain degree of retrospect. I am not immune to shame.

I struggle to find a pathway into describing my whereabouts, but I think the storm is the best place to start.  I am prone to disruptions.  They strike without much warning and make a tangled mess of my thoughts and self-confidence.  If there are warning signs in advance, I am blind to them.  They are infrequent enough lull me into the delusion that they are done and gone.

Almost exactly three weeks ago, I was beset by crippling doubts about my identity.  True, there has always been a “female gravity” bending the trajectory of my life in the direction with which you have become familiar, but this crisis began with an overwhelming sense that, wherever I seem to be headed or feel I need to be, where I am isn’t identifiably feminine to most people, nor, during these dark hours, to me.

The disruption seems to be centered on two perceptions which still loom large in my present state of mind.  First, it is far more than the physical which separates me from other women.  I have been denied (or spared) the particular rhythms and discomforts of feminine physiology, but perhaps even more significantly, I have missed out on so many formative experiences:  I did not grow up in a world which devalued my gender.  I have not been groped or ogled by predatory men.  My size has conferred upon me a degree of protection from conflict.  I have been rewarded, not chastised, for “speaking out”.  I have made one dollar on the dollar.  I have not been asked on a date, nor spent any time worrying that this would never happen.  I have not spent a lifetime being conditioned to fret about my beauty.5  Not only did I get math (many women do, of course); I learned early that I must get math.  Though I have always made friends with women far more naturally than with men, have I ever truly convinced either them or myself that I am one of them?

I am unsurprised that this hit me so hard during the run up and run off of the election, whether or not this was actually the trigger.  Misogyny offends the hell out of me, but have I ever actually felt it?  As much as I desired the election of HRC, would it have produced any sense whatsoever of existential validation for me?  I was born into nearly every privilege imaginable.  What right do I have to see myself as a citizen of Pantsuit Nation?

The second perception was that my identity seems to be largely aspirational.  Am I female or do I simply experience intense conviction hat I ought to be?  I was trained to believe the unbelievable–is this simply the latest version?  Yes, masculinity took effort for me, but does femininity take less?  Without imaging that other women sail from moment to moment free of self-doubt, I observe that they never have to spend a moment convincing anyone else, let alone themselves, of their gender.  I do not think that this is merely to say that I don’t pass in society.  The question is whether I even pass to myself.  I fit the typical profile of a late transitioning transsexual–white, XY socialized male, melancholic, above average intelligence6.  Is there any sense in which transphobic critics, who see my identity as a sustained delusion, have a point?

Suffice it to say, the last several weeks have sucked mightily.  For the first 4-5 days, I was back to being a squirrel in the road, unsure which direction to run and consequently immobilized in front of the approaching headlights.

“Forward?  I can’t go forward!  Back?  I can’t go back!  Oh God, I definitely can’t stay here…”

My brain flip-flopped rapidly, wanting desperately to decide or better, to do something, and yet I knew there was nothing to do.  I just wanted to go back to bed so I could shut it out for a bit.

Fast forwarding a couple of weeks, the intensity has dialed down a little, but I’m still “dazed and confused”, and worse, worried that I won’t ever be able to un-think some of the thoughts of the last couple weeks.  And there is no resolution, no personal victory to report.  I still feel the wind and hear the thunder.

More ominously, this is the first time I have gone through this post-hormonal therapy.  There is certainly a lot more to the sense of calm and general well-being I have tried to convey beyond freedom from crisis, but until now, I really did have freedom from crisis.  For 18 months.  Even more, it had the feeling of resolution.  Peace was the benefit of therapy that justified the various downsides.  What now?

I don’t really know, and I don’t know when I will find out.  Sorry, there is no moral to this story.  Sometimes there isn’t.

 

 

Notes: