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On my way to class, I bumped into Anne, whom I hadn't seen in months.
She's a geneticist and biology professor who came to the college two years ago. At an orientation the September before last, she greeted me and recalled something I hadn't: A couple of months earlier, she was on campus for the first time and was trying to find an office. I walked with her to that office--human resources, if I recall correctly--and gave her a sort of mini-tour.
And, not long after that orientation, I saw her again and she mentioned that she'd found this blog. She really liked it, she said, and admired my courage in my transition and in discussing it publicly. It's still odd, to me anyway, when people say I have courage for doing what I've done. I did only what I needed to do.
We met several times during the subsequent year, my last before the surgery. Ironically, she gave birth around the same time I had my surgery. She was on leave in the fall and was in only part-time--mainly for her research--in the spring. That's why I haven't seen her.
Now her baby is about to turn one year old at just about the same time as I am. I would like to mark the occasion with her; we talked about having lunch one day.
She has said that I was also giving birth--to myself. I agree with that, but I think the purposes and outcomes of those births are different. The surgery is already starting to seem less like a point of demarcation than it had been, or than I thought it would be. I've had the surgery; I'm continuing and changing my life, and while the surgery has been important, it is really, at least in some way, nothing more than a means to an end. Some would argue that seeing the surgery in that way, and that it's "fading into the background," as someone else remarked, is a sign that it and my transition were successful. I would agree with them.
On the other hand, Anne's child will always be a reminder of her having given birth. Or so I would expect. As an event, I'm not sure that it would "fade into the background" because I do not know what purpose, if any, having a child fills--especially for the mother who already has a child.
I know that many women--including a few I know--had children because they wanted to be mothers. While I can understand, at least to some degree, wanting that, it seems to me that having a child and becoming a mother are not things most women do in order to fulfill some other purpose. Instead, giving birth and becoming mothers are things that women seem to do for their own reasons, possibly to fulfill some inner purpose. Somehow I don't think they do those things with the expectation that they will think less about them over time.
Anyway: Anne, if your reading this: J'en souhaite une bonne anniversaire pour l'enfan--et pour toi.
r
"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."
When I began my current life, I had assumed that there were two things I would never have: XX chromosomes and a uterus. Somehow I had the feeling that even though I never would have either one, sometime in my lifetime some trans woman would be fortunate enough to get them.
Well, it seems that the dream of a uterine transplant will come true for a trans woman even sooner than I imagined it would. For the past few days, I've seen stories about Sarah Luiz and her belief that she will become the first transgender woman to give birth.
More than one commentator has said that Ms. Luiz was to the '80's as Christine Jorgensen was to the '50's. She knows this, which is the reason why she has applied to become the first trans woman to receive a uterine transplant. She figures, and she believes the doctors at Downtown Hospital know, that her ability to garner publicity will help them get the money they need to do the research necessary to refine their techniques.
Actually, if any transwoman were chosen to be the first recipient of a uterine transplant, that would generate much more publicity than if a non-transgender woman were to receive it. When I read about the surgery, I had a fleeting temptation to apply for it myself. But I've decided not to, mainly because it's hard for me to rationalize giving birth to a child at this point in my life. After all, by the time that child is a sophomore in high school, I will be eligible to collect Social Security--if indeed it's still available.
Also, I'm not so sure that giving birth will make me more of a woman than I am. Many other women are no more capable of having babies, for any number of reasons, than I am. Yet almost nobody doubts that they're women. Some--including some of those women themselves--may consider them as somehow incomplete or defective women. But in a world--or, at any rate, in any country in which people don't have to give birth to ten children in the hope that four of them will make it to an age in which they can help to support their parents--no one has a responsibility to have children in order to continue the species. Furthermore, women today--again, at least in modern industrial and post-industrial societies--have roles other than those of birthing and nurturing.
One thing I've come to realize is that I am part of what may be the first generation of people to be free of the notion that sex can be justified only for procreative purposes. Some may think it's caused a decline in morality; somehow I get the impression that morality never existed, or at least wasn't as widespread or ingrained as some people seem to think it was. Anyway, I think that being freed of the notion that love must lead to marriage and sex must lead to babies has given us more freedom to define our sexuality and our gender identities--and what those things mean to us--in our own terms.
I think now of how Christine Jorgensen tried so hard to be what women in her place and time were expected to be: As she was researching the new science of gender reassignment, she was also studying to be a nurse because it was considered to be a "woman's job." I also think of how being able to "go stealth" was considered the sign of a successful transition, and how I believed I wouldn't be able to pull it off. And, naturally, my self-esteem rose faster than a rocket Amanda Simpson helped to design whenever I "passed." What that meant was that I seemed more or less like what people expect a woman of my age to be.
Another thing I've come to realize is that, just as the definitions of sexuality have expanded with every person who defines him or her self in his or her own terms, each of us who decides to live by the gender of our mind and spirits rather than what's on our birth certificates is also expanding the definitions of "male," "female," "man," "woman," "boy" and "girl." Even the ones about whom people marvel, "I couldn't tell" change our ideas about gender.
So, it's a most interesting irony that Sarah Luiz is trying to become more like what people have traditionally defined as a woman and that in doing so, she's actually helping to change the definition of "woman, " just as "the man who had a baby" will have contributed to such a change.
As for me...I don't think I need to have a baby in order to feel complete. Perhaps I will feel differently as I spend more time in my new life. But I never before had any wish to have a child, mainly because I felt that someone as conflicted and as full of self-loathing as I was would not make a good parent. I don't regret that decision; I've seen too many kids who were born to such parents (or, worse, to parents who didn't want them). Still, I think it's great that I and many other women (I'm not talking only about trans women.) may soon have yet another choice to make--and another opportunity to define for ourselves what it means to be a woman or man, or, perhaps, something we haven't named yet.
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