Thankful For The Old And The New

Today I'm feeling a little sad.  My friend Mildred, with whom I have spent the past few Thanksgivings, was going to have her Thanksgiving dinner today.  She called earlier; I could tell she wasn't up to it.  "I want to have you over again soon, with Joanne", a mutual friend of ours.  I'm sure she will.  Maybe I'll host something for them.  

Millie's husband, John, hasn't been well.  So it wasn't a surprise she sounded so tired when she called.  Still, it's hard not to feel as I do now:  They are the best friends I've had in a long, long time.

On the other hand, I had a great time yesterday with some new friends.  I met Suzanne and Deborah at a church I began to attend in March.  They live a few neighborhoods away, in Queens.  Suzanne was raised Catholic, as I was, but Deborah is Jewish.  Still, she attends the church:  From what she tells me, she observes the traditions and treasures the culture she inherited, but likes the inclusiveness of the church we attend.  

It just happens that Hanukkah began on Thanksgiving Day. So Suzanne and Deborah combined the celebrations.  It never would have occurred to me to have borscht and latkes with a turkey dinner.  Then again, I wasn't surprised to learn that they actually go well together.  After all, the borscht--which Suzanne and Deborah made from scratch, as they did with everything else they served--is a soup of beets and cabbage, and latkes are, as everyone knows, potato pancakes.  So of course they go with cranberries, pumpkin and corn.  

And the people seemed to mix even more easily.  Suzanne's nonagenarian father, her brother and friends--and those of Debroah's--shared food and conversation with us, and two other people from the church.

All right, I know:  I waited a few months to say anything about church.  I guess I'm still wrapping my head around the idea that I go to one--volutarily, no less.  For a long time, I swore I would never attend any house of worship, or be part of any organized religion, ever again.  I kept that promise for a long time, even in the face of suggestions, prodding and outright pressure from various co-workers, friends and family members. 

I don't think I'll ever believe everything any church or other religious organization teaches.  But somehow it seems oddly right for me--at least, the one I've been attending.  I'm not one of those people who, in her old age, ponders her mortality and heads for the pews.  Actually, even when I didn't believe in any sort of supreme being--or, at least the ones I'd heard of--I knew myself to be spiritual.  In fact, I did my gender transition and reassignment surgery for spiritual reasons:  I am a female spirit; I wasn't merely a man who wanted to be a woman. (Most such men wouldn't even think of doing what I've done.)  And, I did a bit of church-surfing--without, of course, telling anyone what I was doing--before someone suggested I go to the one I've been attending:  St. Luke in the Fields, in Manhattan.

Here's another irony:  the person who suggested St. Luke's is one of the last people in the world I expected to do so.  He heard about it from a friend of his; he himself has never been a church-goer.  Well, I suppose that might be a lesson:  The spirit does not always proceed by logic, even if it makes perfect sense in the end.  I guess that's the reason why you can't solve questions of faith with science any more than you can solve questions of science with faith.

But I digress.  If nothing else, I am thankful that I have old friends and am making new ones, and finding, perhaps, a community.  That, I suspect, is more important than my beliefs (such as they are) align with those of other people or an institution.

Relationships Lost By The Lost Generation

A post from Feministe that recently came my way highlighted an aspect of life for the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

During the time in question--roughly from the time The Transsexual Empire was published until transgender movements were revived (and new ones, particularly for female-to-male transgenders, were begun) in the 1990's, many of us entered into long-term relationships or, at least, relationships we or our partners hoped or planned on being long-term.

Many of us married members of the "opposite" gender from the ones to which we were assigned at birth--that is to say, the gender of our mind and spirit.  Others entered into partnerships of one kind or another, and even had children, but never had the ceremony or got the license.  And then others among us were in relationships with people of the genders in which we were living at the time.

Some of us remained in those relationships for years, or even decades.  In addition to having children, some of us bought houses, started businesses and did any number of other things married couples do.  Some of us even changed careers or other aspects of our lives in order to be with our partners, or they did the same for us.

A few of us (I am not among them) are still in those relationships.  Some are living as siblings or roommates; a fortunate few have spouses or partners who accomodated to the new circumstances of the relationship.  Those partners, whether or not they voiced it, realized that they were in love with the person, not his or her gender.

Unfortunately, not all partners saw their love that way.  Many women base their relationships on the manliness of the man, and many men base their feelings on the womanliness of the woman.  Other men and women simply cannot cope with the fact that they loved people who are of their own gender.  The last relationship I had before I started my transition ended for that very reason.

Sometimes, when we "come out" to our partners or spouses, we are accused of having lied to them when we met.   Some may indeed have practiced such a deception.  More of us (I include myself), however, simply could not articulate, with the language available to us and in cultural climate that surrounded us, exactly how we felt.  During the age of the Lost Generation of Transgenders, most people--even LGBT people and those who could accept us--still thought of gender more or less the way people did at the time Christine Jorgensen had her surgery.  Some of us thought we couldn't be trangendered because we weren't gay or even bisexual; given the ideas we had, we could not reconcile, the fact that we were never attracted to someone of the gender to which we were assigned at birth with our knowledge of our true genders, and our love for someone who was of that gender in body as well as in mind and spirit.  And if we didn't have the knowledge and language to explain it, how could our partners or anyone else understand it?

So, many of us were in relationships that neither we nor our partners could understand.  Some of our friendships and business relationships, and even ones with family members, were based on their and our then-limited understanding of our gender identities and sexualities.  In fact, most people--include yours truly--conflated one with the other.  As a result, we not only lost those marriages and partnerships into which we entered; we also lost relationships with friends, family members and professional colleagues or business associates.  

Those relationships are among the casualties, if you will, of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.  I can understand why someone whose spouse says, after a number of years of marriage, that he or she feels he is trapped in the wrong body would feel betrayed, duped or simply angry:  They feel that the assumptions and beliefs on which they based their lives with the other person were false, and--to use a cliche--that the ground has been knocked out from under them. On the other hand, I also understand (perhaps too well) why we asked those people to become our spouses and partners.  Some of us were indeed desperate and hoped that being in a relationship with someone of the "opposite" gender would extinguish our feelings of having bodies that didn't express our true gender identities.  Others simply loved the people they married, even if they couldn't understand how or why.  (Some would argue that true love is that way in any event.)  I don't think many of us deliberately deceived our partners.  However, they may always feel as if we have.  And that may be one of the more damaging legacies of having to be part of the Lost Generation of Transgenders.

Lunch With My Mother And Her Friend

When I was a teenager, I enjoyed the company of my mother's friends, especially two in particular.  Mrs. Orzel and Mrs. De Land were both very intelligent and interesting people, and I always noticed that my mother was happier and more confident when she was around them.  Maybe that was the reason why I enjoyed being around them:  They made my mother into the person I knew she really was.

Of course, even though I never sensed that they were speaking to me with condescension, I knew even then that I could not consider them as friends or peers.  They were my mother's age, give or take, and I was less than half that.  And, of course, I was living as a boy.  Perhaps they knew that, at least in some ways, I was different from the others.  Those differences may well have been the reason why we got along and I actually preferred spending time with them than with my so-called peers.

My mother is still in touch with Mrs. Orzel who, like her daughter,  has been battling cancer in another part of the country.  She has sent her regards to me, and I've sent mine to her, through my mother.  Sometimes I think I'd like to see her again.

Yesterday I had the sort of encounter I would like to have with Mrs. Orzel--with another of my mother's friends.  We all went to lunch at the local Ruby Tuesday.  And I saw the same sort of change in my mother I used to see when she was around her friends all those years ago:  She was a happier and more confident person.  That has something to do with the fact that her friend can empathise with her in ways that my father, whatever his other virtues, never could.

Fortunately for my mother, this friend lives very close by.  They play bingo together, along with a few other female friends about their age, and sometimes they get together for lunch.  My mother's friend is almost the definition of a "lovely" person:  You feel good about yourself, and a sense of peace, when you're around her.  And I felt that she not only accepted, but welcomed, me.  Perhaps my being my mother's daughter was reason enough for her.  That's fine with me.  I never had the sense she was "tolerating" me.

I have always felt close to my mother.  But I have had, lately, the sense that our relationship is going to change.  I could not say how; I still don't think I can.  However, I think that perhaps some emotional channel of which I'd previously been unaware will open up.  It may well have to do with the wishes I had when I was talking with my mother's friends all of those years ago.

Mournings and Beginnings

"Velouria" has an interesting idea:  I could start a cycling blog.  That intrigues me.  No, better yet:  It seems completely logical, perhaps even inevitable.  


I wonder whether I'll continue this blog after starting that one.  I'm not saying I must make an "either-or" choice.  I'm just starting to realize that, well, this blog has become a sort of friend to me.  And, if you read what I wrote yesterday, or some earlier posts, you know what I've been learning about friendships:  Most cannot last forever, and holding on to one that's outlived its life span--or trying to revive one when whatever made it possible is gone-- can turn what could have been a sweet memory into a sour or bitter lament.


If and when I end this blog, it will be a sad day.  And I might mourn it.  But the reason you mourn something is because it's not coming back--or, at least, it seems not to be coming back.  I must say, in some way I'm mourning my days as a "trans" person.  Why?  In a lot of ways, it was a very exciting time in my life.  During the year before I started to live full-time as Justine, I spent a lot of time in therapy and support groups, started taking hormones and met lots of people who were very different from anyone I'd ever known, and came to love people I never knew I'd love.  The last time I learned as much in a year as I did during that year was probably some year early in my childhood.


Plus, that year, and the ones that followed, were the first time in my life I didn't feel like a victim.  Perhaps that seems paradoxical, as I undertook the journey I've made because, really, I am what I am --at least in one way--through no choice of mine, and I decided to embrace it because I couldn't run from it anymore.  


Mourning something is not the same as missing it.  Whatever you miss is not dead or finished:  You still have access to her, him or it in some way.  That's how I feel, oddly enough, about my surgery and the days immediately afterward.  I was describing this to a woman I know.  She, who has grown children, said, "Well, you were giving birth to yourself.  Why wouldn't you miss that?"  She explained that she still sometimes misses giving birth to her children; she would do it again because "nothing else has given me so much joy."  This woman has many other personal as well as professional accomplishments. But none, she said, gave her quite the same sense of fulfillment and joy as giving birth to, or raising, her kids.


I'm not saying that this is true for all women.  Indeed, I've talked with other women who say that their decision not to have children is the best they ever made.  And there are still other women--and men--who simply should not have children, for any number of reasons.  For that matter, it's probably a good thing I didn't have children.  That was a conscious choice:  Twice I've been with women who wanted children and were perfectly capable of having them.  My wish not to have children is one of the reasons I didn't stay with either of those women.  


If we follow the "birth" analogy, at what stage of "motherhood" am I now?  Friday will mark ten months since my surgery.  What do mothers do for their ten-month-old children?


One thing this "mother" (or "daughter," depending on how you think of it) did late today was to go for a bike ride.  My little trip took me down to the Red Hook piers.  I called my mother from there.  Not having been anywhere near that waterfront in at least thirty years, she wondered what I was doing there.  "Even when I was a kid, people thought it was a rough area," she explained.  I described how it's slowly being turned into Soho-by-the-bay:  Abandoned factories and warehouses have been turned into artist's lofts and studios as well as office spaces for small not-for-profit organizations.  


"Things change," my mother declared. "Time moves on."

Through My Skin

For the past few days, I've had a rather heavy cold. That, of course, has left me tired, which is one reason why I didn't post yesterday. It was the first time in a few weeks that I hadn't written an entry and I felt a little sad about it.

Today I realized that something I've been unable to describe--until now--has changed since, if not as a result of, my surgery. I don't have a name for it (Does one exist?), so I'll describe a manifestation of it.

Sometimes I feel as if I can sense something essential, or at least basic, about a person through and on my skin. You've probably said that someone or another made your skin crawl. Well, sometimes I feel as if some people have that effect on me. Or they make my skin tingle or burn or feel as if it's going to float, and I'm not sure of whether it will remove itself from my body or take the rest of me with it.

I felt something like what I just described--in a much less intense way--after I had been taking hormones for a couple of months. I used to say that I felt as if a layer of skin had been stripped away. Now, sometimes I feel as if I'm a mass of nerve endings. Sometimes that's wonderful: I experience joy like I've never known before. But at other times, I can feel the warning lights flashing without being sure of why.

The weird thing is that I feel as if I'm learning for the first time about people I've known for some time. Sometimes that's a felicitous, or at least a good, thing to experience. However, it can also leave me feeling unsafe around, or annoyed with, someone I once liked. That's how I feel about someone whom I considered to be a good friend not long ago.

Or, sometimes, I just feel no particular reason to talk to someone with whom I once conversed, sometimes at length. Maybe it's because I realize that I no longer have, or have never had, anything in common with that person. That's how I feel about a few people at the college. It's not that I dislike them; I just don't feel any particular connection to them apart from being a co-worker.

On the other hand, I also feel that I have something to talk about--or at least a friendlier "vibe" from people who seemed not to like me before, or whom I didn't think I liked. I'm thinking in particular of one colleague in my department. She started teaching at the college three years ago; from that time until this year, I thought she was rather snobbish or at least aloof. But we have become rather friendly. It may just be that she felt insecure as "the new kid in town": after all, she is young and had just recently finished her PhD. She had a couple of fellowships but, if I'm not mistaken, this is her first full-time faculty position.

But she's been friendly to me ever since I "broke the ice" early in the fall. Maybe she realizes that I'm not a competitor: We may both be in an English department, but the work we do is very different. And, I don't begrudge her that she's way more attractive than I ever was, am or will be. If nothing else, she has a very appealing smile, which I hadn't seen before this year.

Somehow I have the feeling she was intimidated by me. My first encounter with her came when she gave a sample lecture after being interviewed for the job. I was in the audience, among other faculty members and administrators. And I asked her a question--I forget about what, exactly, except that it had to do with the role of gender in a novel she mentioned--and it seemed to make her nervous. I wasn't trying to put her "on the spot;" it was simply a question that came to my mind.

I guess that if I were in her position, I might've been caught off-guard, too. But what she may not have realized at the time was that I was asking the question out of a complete lack of familiarity about the works she was discussing. And, of course, I didn't understand how or why she would be intimidated, at least a little, by that. If that's the reason why she kept her distance from me, I can understand.

Or, it just may be that she knew I'm transgendered: if she couldn't see it at first, she may have realized it from the question I asked. And, she may not have known what to make of that. She could very well been one of the many women who worried about what I'd do in a women's bathroom. (The funny thing is that I try to spend as little time in them as I can; I'm usually not noticing much else besides the cleanliness, or lack thereof, and I'm thinking about what I have to do at that moment and the moment after it.) By now, she's heard that I've had my operation, and she may feel less worried about me as a result of that. And I'm sure that even though she knows that I see her as an attractive woman--I've told her as much, as I'm sure many other people have--she knows by now that I'm not seeing her as a potential sexual partner. Maybe she knows, too, that I see she's really an OK, and rather interesting, person to talk to.

Now, these changes I've experienced don't mean that I'm getting rid of all of my old friends, as some trans people do when they transition. I've thought about making some changes in my life, to be sure--and, in fact, I've had to make one that I'd thought about making. But it will be interesting, at least to me, to see whether the way I feel about other people and things changes during the next six months, year, or few years. I know that happened a few months after I started taking hormones and as I started to live full-time as a woman.