When I first started transition I thought about 4 - 5 years duration would be about right, and I'm still of that opinion.
Anyway, I'll be coming out to the wider blogosphere, to coincide with some fun publicity, in a couple of months time, so a general sort of post about the peculiarities of my transition process.
To reiterate. My process starts less than 3 years ago when I underwent a major hormonal change and, which is the really odd part, my neurology responded until I reached a violent tipping point.
After a first day of wonders and fears, I took 2 weeks to be sure it wasn't any sort of stroke but that I'd changed in a mix of ways and that it was definitely related to gender.
Then followed about 4 months of attempting to locate myself within or without the gender binary. To start I thought I'd have to be some sort of intergendered whatever, since I conceived that 50 odd years of male experience with nary a thought of anything else didn't exactly enable me to attain female gender. And it initially felt like having some weird sort of ability to go between gender gestalts, except for the way that 90% of the time I was overwhelmingly female, so I was rather concerned with underlying authenticity or whatever. But the process of identifying myself as having a female gender as the only active one was absolutely clear at the end of that time. So I set myself a further 3 months to see that nothing would change, saw a couple of counsellors and talked to a few non-specialist therapists and started changing my life to female presentation etc. I had an understanding employer (myself), and a supportive crowd around and approximately zero knowledge of things like makeup, clothes, voice and unable to have electro for about 6 months. It bid fair to be a long strange trip with no certainty of surviving it.
The way I thought, and still think about it, is as a process of growing up.When I first started I was about 9 or 10. Now I'm 13 and not so far off the jaded cynicism of a battle hardened 14 year old. In terms of measuring puberty, I've been having strong monthly cycles through the emotional mill for about 18 months and it's questionable whether I can really qualify as a suitable bait for unicorns.
I can't do drab anymore. Recently tried being andro for UK coming out visit and it simply didn't work. I pass reasonably on the streets but not long in conversation. Passing isn't a great deal for me, since I prefer to be reasonably out in terms of my history to the people I know and meet.
At the heart of my transition is a search for understanding how I now work. I prefer to view it in those terms because I want to avoid anything relating to gender performance having a primary role. I'm not sure how that matches with conventional trans narratives. I suppose because everything's been so concertina'd in my case it's bound to be different. I don't look out much for validation, though I'm really happy when I find it, in outside reactions. I'm a strangely immature woman to those who are my friends, in so far as I can tell, and an acceptable freak to many who aren't.But it's in understanding how this whole strange complex of female gestalt actually works, how things now fit together. It's the times of - oh that's what it's like to be a woman and that explains...- that I find the most exciting.Things like this...
A couple of months before starting transition, I was in a line at Tesco behind a woman who was in a really bad mood and taking it out on a hapless (female) cashier. Eventually she left and it was my turn. Passing the cashier I looked up and exchanged eye gestures with the cashier. Broadly it went ; (me) hard luck on getting one like that, (her)there's always one, (me) at least it's over with & sympathy, (her)getting to the end of the day soon anyway & thanks. I went into the mall outside, sat down on a bench and just rested and recovered for a quarter of an hour. It wasn't so much that it was rather more detailed than most normal gesture interchanges I'd had as much as being compressed to the point of happening 5-10 times faster than any similar experience I'd had.
I still remember the time I was sitting on an office chair, rocking a little in it whilst some music or other was on in the room, and suddenly realizing there was something totally new going on. It took about 30 seconds before the bamboo cane fell and enlightenment spewed forth. I was moving with the music. 50 odd years of music behind me and I'd never once moved WITH the music. Always as a counterpoint, an act of self definition through music, never just simply moving with it; never simply carried on the rhythms. And I had two thoughts about it. On the one hand I started seriously fantasizing about going for some sort of dancing because bump and grind theremin playing in a noise band didn't really do it for me. And on the other thinking how good an illustration it was of the effects of switching to an inductive cognitive paradigm and the consequences for abandoning the self-reinforcing differentiating paradigm typical of testosterone systems on agency in gender identity.
Or something.
A few months back I was in my place on a busy friday night when a woman came in I'd only met in passing a couple of times, and before transition started. She came in and was clearly relating to me as a guy in a dress. It happens and she wasn't the most perceptive of people. She was waiting for a couple of people she knew when a male friend sat down and started talking to me. Now he's a nice guy but the effects of alcohol and the lateness of the hour lent his words a quality of some considerable tedium. So I leaned forward with a light smile, concentrated expression and put that on automatic whilst I started thinking of other things entirely. The woman saw me doing it and totally changed in a flurry of eye signals.When the guy got up we went into an intense hour long talk with her apologising and overwhelmingly curious about the process of adolescence that I saw myself in. That was worth a lot more than barrel loads of pronouns or compliments to me. It's gone that way many times, before and since, but rarely so clear cut.
Again, I'm unsure why others' narratives so rarely include these sorts of things. Can understand that it might partly relate to feeling a necessity to be totally sure of their target gender and transition being at the end of a significant period of soul searching. Equally it may be that others also go through shifts but they're slow progressive processes rather than the violent one I had. But it leads to the odd feeling that I'm certain of being a woman, but not so certain of being trans, in terms of trans relating to individuals' more conventional narrative structures.
More reasonably soon on this....
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Oh dear...a vogon moment
Simply wanted to do an extended metaphor thing on trans women when it turned into this.
We are
We are the people of the river,
we are the waterborn,
we are those who have heard the sea's call.
We are the swimmers, washed downstream,
we are those caught in the pools along the oxbow way,
we are those that are wrecked, flung broken down the rapids,
we are those who arrive battered to the estuary,
we are those born by the coast,
we are those latecomers who finally follow our sisters into ocean.
We are those who have heard the songs of the river,
we are those new shaped, salt forged, in the fierce rush of waters,
we are those who have answered the call of the sea.
We are
We are the people of the river,
we are the waterborn,
we are those who have heard the sea's call.
We are the swimmers, washed downstream,
we are those caught in the pools along the oxbow way,
we are those that are wrecked, flung broken down the rapids,
we are those who arrive battered to the estuary,
we are those born by the coast,
we are those latecomers who finally follow our sisters into ocean.
We are those who have heard the songs of the river,
we are those new shaped, salt forged, in the fierce rush of waters,
we are those who have answered the call of the sea.
Monday, September 13, 2010
On becoming a woman (3)
So first apologies.
Low energy, clearing up business stuff I've been unable to do for too long, family problems, getting to know my awesome husband and getting less asexual.
And being uncertain about how and where to get going.
So this time I'll say what I want to talk about, rather than come up with the full complexities of my present model.
I want to talk about figure and ground.
I want to talk about focus and frame.
I want to talk about different paradigms of perception/cognition based on association and differentiation.
I want to talk about the division of conscious and unconscious processing that reflect those paradigms.
I want to talk about the gendered difference in the engagement of awareness in the act of cognition.
I want to talk about the grid of hormonally differentiated arousal gestalts and the construction of meaning.
I want to talk about gendered difference in the contingency relations of construct and world and the reflexive consequences for personality formation.
I want to talk about gender identity as an interdependent system of cognitive structures and strategies based on coherent perceptual paradigms, (separating the two for convenience sake).
I want to talk about using this standpoint as a watchtower upon kyriarchy.
I mean, what else should a growing girl base herself on than radical essentialist feminism ? And where else can I look for a transfeminism that allots value to trans narratives as illuminations of gender ?
And of course I want to talk about stuff like how a relativistic spatial perception alters the
expressive content of communications and gender differentiates linguistic bases.
And why I feel that Judith Butler does not necessarily do less harm by being a wise fool than Germaine Greer has done as a, in the words of the ever delightful Angela Carter, clever one.
And stuff about my awesome husband, if she'll let me.
And maybe something about shoes.
Low energy, clearing up business stuff I've been unable to do for too long, family problems, getting to know my awesome husband and getting less asexual.
And being uncertain about how and where to get going.
So this time I'll say what I want to talk about, rather than come up with the full complexities of my present model.
I want to talk about figure and ground.
I want to talk about focus and frame.
I want to talk about different paradigms of perception/cognition based on association and differentiation.
I want to talk about the division of conscious and unconscious processing that reflect those paradigms.
I want to talk about the gendered difference in the engagement of awareness in the act of cognition.
I want to talk about the grid of hormonally differentiated arousal gestalts and the construction of meaning.
I want to talk about gendered difference in the contingency relations of construct and world and the reflexive consequences for personality formation.
I want to talk about gender identity as an interdependent system of cognitive structures and strategies based on coherent perceptual paradigms, (separating the two for convenience sake).
I want to talk about using this standpoint as a watchtower upon kyriarchy.
I mean, what else should a growing girl base herself on than radical essentialist feminism ? And where else can I look for a transfeminism that allots value to trans narratives as illuminations of gender ?
And of course I want to talk about stuff like how a relativistic spatial perception alters the
expressive content of communications and gender differentiates linguistic bases.
And why I feel that Judith Butler does not necessarily do less harm by being a wise fool than Germaine Greer has done as a, in the words of the ever delightful Angela Carter, clever one.
And stuff about my awesome husband, if she'll let me.
And maybe something about shoes.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
on becoming a woman (2)
One final quick caveat. There is an easier way to do this. Unfortunately if you're reading this it's probably too late to pursue, but I'd suggest reading the Bardo Thodol and watching out for that smoky red light next time around.
The day I was born, about 2 years ago from my present 12 year old perspective, ( which is a bit better than the 10 year old one last year when I was 56 ), I can remember a couple of things clearly.
The first was, in early afternoon, looking round the room I was in and thinking mf, mf, mf. As a diagnosis I quickly discarded it, after all it had been over a decade since I'd taken any drug of an equivalent strength to mescaline, and I never have flashbacks. I think the comparison was down to being aware of a kind of sensual vibrancy, especially centered on sight, and a kind of heightened awareness of energy flows. Then I started looking at people passing by and then things got REALLY interesting. Looking back, I tend to interpret it as being made aware of the death of my male self and the start of the female journey. At the time, though, it was first of all an intuitive understanding of male/ female ways of seeing each other and a bewilderment that I'd been on the planet for so long without working it out.
NOTE This was totally atypical for me in any drug state. I don't do realisation like that at all.
In effect this was seeing a difference in the focus of consciousness between genders, something that I initially saw as relating to mutual attraction but which gradually widened to embrace the totality of world views. That night I went to sleep in the knowledge that it was rather doubtful if I was male any more on the simple intuitive ground that if that were to still be the case then I'd have been unable to see men in the way that I now could.
Initially, however, the notion that something had happened to my sense of gender took second place to the notion of brain damage. In many ways this was my greatest fear with ESLD, the possible state of 'confusion' due to ammonia compounds penetrating the blood/ brain barrier and possibly leading to coma and death in a few months. I really hadn't worked out how to confront that. So a lot of the next couple of weeks were spent trying to come to grips with what was actually happening. I went into a whole set of activities trying to map any changes in cognition through a number of tests, puzzles and interactions. Within a week or so, the idea of liver induced mental confusion was demoted to the status of an extremely unlikely possibility. Basically virtually none of the normal symptoms applied, and no-one, doctor or other, since has proffered the possibility of any other form of neural damage. On the other hand something relating to gender and hormones became far more likely. Given that I'd had a lessened,spironolactonised sexuality for a few months and favoured tops that concealed my budding gynecomastia it wasn't the most far out hypothesis.
Anyway, initially testing myself in straight recall, concussion type stuff, no change really from normal that I could find. There was some disruption and change in higher level mathematical, verbal and strategic performance.
Reading and chess were interesting. In terms of reading speed my performance was down some 50%-65%, but that was partially due to concentration. The other part I put down to pattern recognition disruption, a view I've since partially altered. Bear in mind that my reading had been such as to be able to read 3 standard paperbacks a day of some reasonable standard. It's since partially recovered.
Chess, at my best, was good club standard in the UK and is an old friend in terms of being a cognitive performance measure. A mild overall improvement together with an enhanced tendency to find tactical nuances easily, was odd. Games in general were variable in performance, though word games were generally the same or better and maths puzzles often worse, though I feel that difference more task related than to do with the nature of the material.
Sadly I lacked the foresight to have recently preceding comparable results to hand under controlled conditions, but I exercise my mind in a number of standard such ways, and feel I'm a fair observer in this regard.
In the first couple of days of the process, though, in ways that relate both to psychology and art, and more sketchily to phenomenology, I was thinking of figure and ground as being core descriptive. And these particular questions became more and more important and central to the early development of the model that I was trying to construct. If the figure focus is determined by perceptions whose structure is gender dimorphic, what does that mean for individual cognition ? To what extent are there at least two systems of consciousness that spring from two radically different modes of information processing, on a level of perceptual quanta, that we can term gender ?
This was given added significance when, in the first few weeks I became aware of a truly surprising change in the ways that I was able to surprise myself. It concerned those things one says because one knows them, and only realize during or after the saying that this was knowledge that one had adduced by some set of unconscious processes. They started to vary in kind. Most of my life such utterances would be relating to delineating a frame, an overarching pattern, but now they were far more likely to comprise a direct linear analysis.
I wasted a lot of time trying to get a Jungian thing to work, with the vague notion of anima and animus exchanging places. I suppose it does have some explanatory power, but not really within cognitive psychology, which is where I was centering myself. So I didn't want to have to deal with much psychoanalytic baggage.
Am going through a period of intense lassitude at present, (it's a cyclic ESLD thing), so I'll pause here for a week or so.
The day I was born, about 2 years ago from my present 12 year old perspective, ( which is a bit better than the 10 year old one last year when I was 56 ), I can remember a couple of things clearly.
The first was, in early afternoon, looking round the room I was in and thinking mf, mf, mf. As a diagnosis I quickly discarded it, after all it had been over a decade since I'd taken any drug of an equivalent strength to mescaline, and I never have flashbacks. I think the comparison was down to being aware of a kind of sensual vibrancy, especially centered on sight, and a kind of heightened awareness of energy flows. Then I started looking at people passing by and then things got REALLY interesting. Looking back, I tend to interpret it as being made aware of the death of my male self and the start of the female journey. At the time, though, it was first of all an intuitive understanding of male/ female ways of seeing each other and a bewilderment that I'd been on the planet for so long without working it out.
NOTE This was totally atypical for me in any drug state. I don't do realisation like that at all.
In effect this was seeing a difference in the focus of consciousness between genders, something that I initially saw as relating to mutual attraction but which gradually widened to embrace the totality of world views. That night I went to sleep in the knowledge that it was rather doubtful if I was male any more on the simple intuitive ground that if that were to still be the case then I'd have been unable to see men in the way that I now could.
Initially, however, the notion that something had happened to my sense of gender took second place to the notion of brain damage. In many ways this was my greatest fear with ESLD, the possible state of 'confusion' due to ammonia compounds penetrating the blood/ brain barrier and possibly leading to coma and death in a few months. I really hadn't worked out how to confront that. So a lot of the next couple of weeks were spent trying to come to grips with what was actually happening. I went into a whole set of activities trying to map any changes in cognition through a number of tests, puzzles and interactions. Within a week or so, the idea of liver induced mental confusion was demoted to the status of an extremely unlikely possibility. Basically virtually none of the normal symptoms applied, and no-one, doctor or other, since has proffered the possibility of any other form of neural damage. On the other hand something relating to gender and hormones became far more likely. Given that I'd had a lessened,spironolactonised sexuality for a few months and favoured tops that concealed my budding gynecomastia it wasn't the most far out hypothesis.
Anyway, initially testing myself in straight recall, concussion type stuff, no change really from normal that I could find. There was some disruption and change in higher level mathematical, verbal and strategic performance.
Reading and chess were interesting. In terms of reading speed my performance was down some 50%-65%, but that was partially due to concentration. The other part I put down to pattern recognition disruption, a view I've since partially altered. Bear in mind that my reading had been such as to be able to read 3 standard paperbacks a day of some reasonable standard. It's since partially recovered.
Chess, at my best, was good club standard in the UK and is an old friend in terms of being a cognitive performance measure. A mild overall improvement together with an enhanced tendency to find tactical nuances easily, was odd. Games in general were variable in performance, though word games were generally the same or better and maths puzzles often worse, though I feel that difference more task related than to do with the nature of the material.
Sadly I lacked the foresight to have recently preceding comparable results to hand under controlled conditions, but I exercise my mind in a number of standard such ways, and feel I'm a fair observer in this regard.
In the first couple of days of the process, though, in ways that relate both to psychology and art, and more sketchily to phenomenology, I was thinking of figure and ground as being core descriptive. And these particular questions became more and more important and central to the early development of the model that I was trying to construct. If the figure focus is determined by perceptions whose structure is gender dimorphic, what does that mean for individual cognition ? To what extent are there at least two systems of consciousness that spring from two radically different modes of information processing, on a level of perceptual quanta, that we can term gender ?
This was given added significance when, in the first few weeks I became aware of a truly surprising change in the ways that I was able to surprise myself. It concerned those things one says because one knows them, and only realize during or after the saying that this was knowledge that one had adduced by some set of unconscious processes. They started to vary in kind. Most of my life such utterances would be relating to delineating a frame, an overarching pattern, but now they were far more likely to comprise a direct linear analysis.
I wasted a lot of time trying to get a Jungian thing to work, with the vague notion of anima and animus exchanging places. I suppose it does have some explanatory power, but not really within cognitive psychology, which is where I was centering myself. So I didn't want to have to deal with much psychoanalytic baggage.
Am going through a period of intense lassitude at present, (it's a cyclic ESLD thing), so I'll pause here for a week or so.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
On becoming a woman (1)
The following is my introduction to an account of my transition. It comes with all sorts of caveats, and, hopefully, will not be an easy read. There are some difficult questions here that demand involvement.
As regards what credence can be placed on my story, I can assert that I am definitely a real person in a public place most of my time. When I've commented on significant sites I've generally given some references. For a variety of reasons relating to health issues, I don't want my name any more on the internet than I can help, but I was outed in the NYT and my trans status is fairly public, ie several thousand people directly.
As to medical diagnosis I'm still not professionally categorized, since I'm in a problematic situation re different types of care. But my physical changes are normal for ESLD and I have general doctors and counsellors that I've spoken with who all support a trans diagnosis. I don't fit elsewhere.
If I'm putting on some kind of act I must be very very good at it 24/7.
And in my present life situation, there frankly isn't much motivation to conceal.
I really don't know how well trans people can relate to the totality of this particular transition, since I seem to have had GID & dysphoria stuff happening concurrent with hormonal change and lacking much of a basis in my past life.
I never put on female clothes, except for a couple of drag parties in my youth and 1 more recent, and never had any interest in them, never had a thought that I can remember of not being male, had a fair number of straight relationships and was never particularly excited by, or intimate with, men in group sex situations.
That said, in many ways I've been 'gender lite' through most of my life, in terms of feminism and social relationships.
My rough picture is that, in terms of brain sex, I must have had some vestigial ambiguity which was never any major problem until a bucket load of hormones came along and activated it. Although such a case, with regard to my specific health issues, has so far evaded the medical literature, I can easily imagine it being an occasional phenomena covered up because it causes problems with gatekeepers. And it's always possible that it ties up with something like DES.
Let me be quite clear. I am talking about something best described as a gender change. I am talking about moving from the world of men to the world of women, with concomitant effects on gender identity. I am talking about basic perceptual and cognitive changes of an immediate character, in many ways. I am talking about a gender change, with gender identification lagging behind, that seemed to happen in a moment.
Though we're very different in many ways, I broke down crying for what seemed like hours when I read Zoe Brains account of something similarly sudden. It was the last piece that fell into place, the last time I could even fantasize about a get-out-of-trans-free card. She put it eloquently here :-
A.E.Brain
If you haven't read much of this blog before, the first post
Original post
and the second to last one
here
are particularly relevant.
Any good intro to cognitive psychology might also be worthwhile checking out. I'll be abstracting some stuff from gestalt psychology, as regards perceptual paradigms, bits from Kelly and Whorf,
something from Husserl, but hopefully nothing that needs to be too technical in language. And if you have expertise in contemporary studies of gender dimorphic neural structures, you're way ahead of me.
I hope the series of posts to follow will make for an interesting passage together. It is, in the end, just a personal account of a journey. But whilst it may cover some of the same ground as many others, it's been more like a voyage by air than slogging through the undergrowth. In that way, it may afford some interesting views that aren't usually touched on at all.
As regards what credence can be placed on my story, I can assert that I am definitely a real person in a public place most of my time. When I've commented on significant sites I've generally given some references. For a variety of reasons relating to health issues, I don't want my name any more on the internet than I can help, but I was outed in the NYT and my trans status is fairly public, ie several thousand people directly.
As to medical diagnosis I'm still not professionally categorized, since I'm in a problematic situation re different types of care. But my physical changes are normal for ESLD and I have general doctors and counsellors that I've spoken with who all support a trans diagnosis. I don't fit elsewhere.
If I'm putting on some kind of act I must be very very good at it 24/7.
And in my present life situation, there frankly isn't much motivation to conceal.
I really don't know how well trans people can relate to the totality of this particular transition, since I seem to have had GID & dysphoria stuff happening concurrent with hormonal change and lacking much of a basis in my past life.
I never put on female clothes, except for a couple of drag parties in my youth and 1 more recent, and never had any interest in them, never had a thought that I can remember of not being male, had a fair number of straight relationships and was never particularly excited by, or intimate with, men in group sex situations.
That said, in many ways I've been 'gender lite' through most of my life, in terms of feminism and social relationships.
My rough picture is that, in terms of brain sex, I must have had some vestigial ambiguity which was never any major problem until a bucket load of hormones came along and activated it. Although such a case, with regard to my specific health issues, has so far evaded the medical literature, I can easily imagine it being an occasional phenomena covered up because it causes problems with gatekeepers. And it's always possible that it ties up with something like DES.
Let me be quite clear. I am talking about something best described as a gender change. I am talking about moving from the world of men to the world of women, with concomitant effects on gender identity. I am talking about basic perceptual and cognitive changes of an immediate character, in many ways. I am talking about a gender change, with gender identification lagging behind, that seemed to happen in a moment.
Though we're very different in many ways, I broke down crying for what seemed like hours when I read Zoe Brains account of something similarly sudden. It was the last piece that fell into place, the last time I could even fantasize about a get-out-of-trans-free card. She put it eloquently here :-
A.E.Brain
If you haven't read much of this blog before, the first post
Original post
and the second to last one
here
are particularly relevant.
Any good intro to cognitive psychology might also be worthwhile checking out. I'll be abstracting some stuff from gestalt psychology, as regards perceptual paradigms, bits from Kelly and Whorf,
something from Husserl, but hopefully nothing that needs to be too technical in language. And if you have expertise in contemporary studies of gender dimorphic neural structures, you're way ahead of me.
I hope the series of posts to follow will make for an interesting passage together. It is, in the end, just a personal account of a journey. But whilst it may cover some of the same ground as many others, it's been more like a voyage by air than slogging through the undergrowth. In that way, it may afford some interesting views that aren't usually touched on at all.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Tidying up - no more Mr Nice Guy
So I've had my wake along with a few friends who knew, or had heard of, my man. I think its eased me somewhat, not that the evening was emotionally involving particularly or confirming of identity, but that I shouldn't take it quite so seriously.
It ties in with the way the last few months have gone, which has been very much internal understandings rather than effort into performance. Which has led to some rather fun things with people. I probably 'pass' worse now than before my leg was broken, but I've had a few times recently with women who start with the notion that I'm a guy in drag and then they get it. And then they smile and laugh a bit and start opening up their languages and a couple of times we talk about it and its usually because I've done some things that they'd never seen a man do. Sometimes there's a performative element, gesture reinforcement of speech, say, but generally a sort of natural indication of common female experience. Which is cool, but then I guess I don't see the negative responses in front of me. Still I'm easier in myself.
Again I fail to write on sisterhood which I guess is down to the fact that it is such a strong thing and something that would need me to talk about how I've explored all my changes.
So, a year after starting this blog, that's what I'm going to do.
My favourite copy editor said I should, so I've got a professional to blame. No, she doesn't edit me, and with the exception of a couple of posts, I just write , edit, publish.
Partly that's because I'd like people to understand where I might be biased, because I do rather want this to be examined as more than some persons fantasy. Its certainly been the most important thing that's ever happened to me, and I'd like it to be seen clearly.
I'm not sure how people will relate to it, how far it's generalisable in trans terms, how far it's a feminist critique of gender, how far it could help in informing a cognitive model of humanity as gender dimorphic infovores within the noosphere ; in short WTF it is.
So,this is a general request for a degree of indulgence. It would be good to know that people out there could join with me in the spirit of this simple song as a sentiment to inform the upcoming postings.
It ties in with the way the last few months have gone, which has been very much internal understandings rather than effort into performance. Which has led to some rather fun things with people. I probably 'pass' worse now than before my leg was broken, but I've had a few times recently with women who start with the notion that I'm a guy in drag and then they get it. And then they smile and laugh a bit and start opening up their languages and a couple of times we talk about it and its usually because I've done some things that they'd never seen a man do. Sometimes there's a performative element, gesture reinforcement of speech, say, but generally a sort of natural indication of common female experience. Which is cool, but then I guess I don't see the negative responses in front of me. Still I'm easier in myself.
Again I fail to write on sisterhood which I guess is down to the fact that it is such a strong thing and something that would need me to talk about how I've explored all my changes.
So, a year after starting this blog, that's what I'm going to do.
My favourite copy editor said I should, so I've got a professional to blame. No, she doesn't edit me, and with the exception of a couple of posts, I just write , edit, publish.
Partly that's because I'd like people to understand where I might be biased, because I do rather want this to be examined as more than some persons fantasy. Its certainly been the most important thing that's ever happened to me, and I'd like it to be seen clearly.
I'm not sure how people will relate to it, how far it's generalisable in trans terms, how far it's a feminist critique of gender, how far it could help in informing a cognitive model of humanity as gender dimorphic infovores within the noosphere ; in short WTF it is.
So,this is a general request for a degree of indulgence. It would be good to know that people out there could join with me in the spirit of this simple song as a sentiment to inform the upcoming postings.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Two pictures
Having come to the conclusion that I can't post meaningfully on sisterhood without making certain things about my process clear, two pictures, fairly new ones that I try and put over.
So imagine a place where all the inhabitants speak either french or german together with an inbetween slang dialect. The germans are mostly tall, blonde, blue eyed, and wear lederhosen ; the french smaller, dark-haired and wear strings of garlic over striped tops.
You're german, but a bit atypical. You've spent more than usual time talking with the french, and your slang forms reflect that.
Then one day you wake up and everything's changed. You understand french, and your german starts to fade. In ways you don't clearly understand, french makes sense. And germans...those pointless drills, those martial endeavors, that ridiculous allergy to wearing garlic...how could you ever have been locked up in all that germanness ?
And you wait for it to go away, and it doesn't.
And you know you have to be german still in some ways, so maybe you need a dual passport or something...but then you understand that you WERE german and german stuff just doesn't work anymore.
You read about born germans who could never really speak the language, but tried in various ways to speak french, thereby changing their nationality. And you read the stuff about how such germans go against the will of Wotan, and are nothing but secret garlic lovers. And you read how language is just a constructed social interface and that the roots of language, which are now part of everything you do and see, aren't really there. And you change inside, because german throats can't pronounce french. And you change outside, and try to change yourself more, because you know you can't live in a world where everyone speaks the wrong language to you.
And you start to learn to speak french, because whilst you understand it as your native tongue, speaking the forms still have to be learned. And the spirit of french gradually grows in you, altering you in ways that only a french child knows.
You know you'll always be a bit tall and blonde, but the clothes can maybe alter. And though its hard for germans to understand, really its the french and their recognition and support that are important.
And though a new passport will be useful, to go with the clothes, they're really not that important. It's the language and the way that changes you through use that's the thing, not 'identity' as in a passport, but to speak the world as it now is in the shapes that now have meaning for you.
Then there's a picture which goes somewhat further into the ground of gender. Try to imagine, as seems indeed to be the case, and is a striking perceptual change as far as I'm concerned, that women have a significantly finer discrimination as regards colour, compared to a male vision where the differentiations of shape are more foregrounded.
Confront these extremes with a jigsaw puzzle and the proto-woman might adopt strategies for initially sorting pieces by colour grouping, whilst the imaginary male might sort by lines. As time and puzzles presented, both learn the others strategies and in the end it may not be too easy for the outside observer to tell which way either is biased.What price gender then ? But for the participants and their journeys, it's totally different for each. The finished players may even have identical strategies in the end, but the foundations and building are anything but identical. There is not anything like the shared commonality that the finished articles suggest. And the lessons learned along the way, they too are separate and distinct.
My condition, and I believe the condition of most transexuals, relates to those basal layers, the heart and ground of gender rather than gender in the world.
I don't know how far these are representative purely of my own experience or not. I put them forward as that, and potentially as reasonable descriptions of processes and distinctions that might be common in certain ways to other trans people. Feedback on this specific aspect would be deeply appreciated.
So imagine a place where all the inhabitants speak either french or german together with an inbetween slang dialect. The germans are mostly tall, blonde, blue eyed, and wear lederhosen ; the french smaller, dark-haired and wear strings of garlic over striped tops.
You're german, but a bit atypical. You've spent more than usual time talking with the french, and your slang forms reflect that.
Then one day you wake up and everything's changed. You understand french, and your german starts to fade. In ways you don't clearly understand, french makes sense. And germans...those pointless drills, those martial endeavors, that ridiculous allergy to wearing garlic...how could you ever have been locked up in all that germanness ?
And you wait for it to go away, and it doesn't.
And you know you have to be german still in some ways, so maybe you need a dual passport or something...but then you understand that you WERE german and german stuff just doesn't work anymore.
You read about born germans who could never really speak the language, but tried in various ways to speak french, thereby changing their nationality. And you read the stuff about how such germans go against the will of Wotan, and are nothing but secret garlic lovers. And you read how language is just a constructed social interface and that the roots of language, which are now part of everything you do and see, aren't really there. And you change inside, because german throats can't pronounce french. And you change outside, and try to change yourself more, because you know you can't live in a world where everyone speaks the wrong language to you.
And you start to learn to speak french, because whilst you understand it as your native tongue, speaking the forms still have to be learned. And the spirit of french gradually grows in you, altering you in ways that only a french child knows.
You know you'll always be a bit tall and blonde, but the clothes can maybe alter. And though its hard for germans to understand, really its the french and their recognition and support that are important.
And though a new passport will be useful, to go with the clothes, they're really not that important. It's the language and the way that changes you through use that's the thing, not 'identity' as in a passport, but to speak the world as it now is in the shapes that now have meaning for you.
Then there's a picture which goes somewhat further into the ground of gender. Try to imagine, as seems indeed to be the case, and is a striking perceptual change as far as I'm concerned, that women have a significantly finer discrimination as regards colour, compared to a male vision where the differentiations of shape are more foregrounded.
Confront these extremes with a jigsaw puzzle and the proto-woman might adopt strategies for initially sorting pieces by colour grouping, whilst the imaginary male might sort by lines. As time and puzzles presented, both learn the others strategies and in the end it may not be too easy for the outside observer to tell which way either is biased.What price gender then ? But for the participants and their journeys, it's totally different for each. The finished players may even have identical strategies in the end, but the foundations and building are anything but identical. There is not anything like the shared commonality that the finished articles suggest. And the lessons learned along the way, they too are separate and distinct.
My condition, and I believe the condition of most transexuals, relates to those basal layers, the heart and ground of gender rather than gender in the world.
I don't know how far these are representative purely of my own experience or not. I put them forward as that, and potentially as reasonable descriptions of processes and distinctions that might be common in certain ways to other trans people. Feedback on this specific aspect would be deeply appreciated.
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