The Last One?

The past year or so has been pretty strange.  Not bad, just unnerving.  Or I just don’t know what to make of it, or perhaps I’m not accepting something.

Of course I am still sad about John’s death.  Yesterday the mail carrier brought one of those “In Memoriam” cards with his photo and an inscription:  his birthdate, date of death, “Beloved husband of Mildred, father of Stefanie and Lisa, grandfather of Melanie and Steven.” And friend to me, to Joanne, to many other people.

I’m realizing that he’s probably the last male friend I’ve made in my life.  I can call him that because I never thought of him as someone I knew just because he was Mildred’s husband; he is one of the few men with whom I’ve felt comfortable.  In some ways, it seems improbable:  On the surface, we didn’t have that much in common.  But he, like Millie, knew the kinds of things about people and life that you don’t learn in classrooms, in seminars or seminaries, or in any place where people try to explain life in terms of theories or categories.  That, I believe, is the reason why they met me near the end of my life as Nick and became even better friends as I changed my clothes, my name, some of my surroundings, the way I think and, finally, my body.

I’m realizing that he may have been the last male friend I had.  Perhaps it was inevitable that, one day, I wouldn’t have any more male friends, if for no other reason that I never had very many.  Over the past year, I’ve met some men who have been nice, even kind, to me and didn’t seek anything in return.  Some belong to, or at least attend, the church that’s become part of my life.  At least two or three seem like they genuinely want to be friendly with me outside the eglesial walls, perhaps one of them might want to be in a more intimate relationship with me.  But I’m not ready for that, for him, for them.  To tell you the truth, I don’t want to be.  If anything, if I’m going to have such a relationship, I’d be more interested in having it with another woman, but even the prospect of that doesn’t interest, much less excite, me. 

For that matter, I don’t even feel ready to make new friends.  Actually, that’s not quite right:  I’m not ready to call anybody I’ve met within the past year, two years, a friend.  Perhaps it’s a matter of my age:  At this point in my life, I don’t think I can make instantaneous or even quick friendships. Perhaps it’s generational:  I didn’t grow up with the notion that someone I met only on some social medium is a friend.  (What can I say to someone who says he has 789 Facebook friends?)  It’s hard to think of anyone I’ve known less than ten—or, maybe, five—as a friend.

Someone might say I haven’t quite recovered from what Dominick or other men in my life have done to me.  They’re probably right.  Maybe I’m not ready to recover, whatever that means.  Maybe I can’t, or shouldn’t.  And, perhaps, it might keep me from thinking of myself as having made a new friend, especially with a man.

Two Years Later

Today marks two years since my GRS/SRS.  In one sense, it's hard to believe:  It really does seem like only yesterday.  However, in another sense, the way time has passed makes perfect sense: I had the surgery so I could get on with my life.  That means change and learning are inevitable.  Life without those things is--for me, anyway--not an option.  I don't mean that I don't want it; I simply mean that I couldn't choose any other way, really.

Danny, one of my "classmates" in Trinidad, e-mailed me a few days ago.  I would like it if we can stay in touch; his humor, intelligence and empathy make any communication from him a rewarding experience.  I really would like to see him again some day. 

As for the other "alumni" I met there, I am always open to stay in touch with them; they have, if nothing else, a sympathetic ear in me.  However, I notice that I haven't been in touch with the others in a while.  Now I understand why I am not sad about that:  They had their surgeries for essentially the same reasons why I had mine.  I hope their lives are progressing in the ways they had hoped; perhaps this shared experience will figure in some way or another in our lives in the future. Whether it does or it doesn't, that will have been the point of our having the surgeries and, more important, undergoing our transitions.  

Moving on, as we used to say when funk bands ruled the world.  (Yes, they really did, once!)  That is the reason why, I've just noticed, I'm no longer sad about the relationships I lost during my transition.  People have told me that the ones who de-friended me weren't really friends in the first place.  Perhaps that is true.  But I now realize that even if I had not embarked upon this journey (I hope that doesn't sound too quaint!), we may have gone our separate ways.  The same, I believe, is true about the relationship I had with Tammy:  It made me happy, at least in some ways, for a time in my life, but we probably wouldn't be together now even if I hadn't started my transition.  And, I think, the same is true for those relatives who broke or drifted away:  However close we might have been at one time, we simply had very little in common, even when I was still living as Nick.

So, yes, I have a vagina that looks like the ones my gynecologist has seen on cis women.  (And, yes, it looks like the ones I've seen.  I'll let you think, if you care to, how I came to see them.)  And I've been feeling good physically.  But I think the most important way in which the operation has been a success is that I am living the rest of my life, and learning what that means for me.

Meeting The Past, Again

This summer, I'm teaching a class on the campus where I worked my primary job this year. Something odd is happening:  Even though I have only taught that class for a week (It runs for seven and a half weeks.), I feel closer to those students than I have to any I have taught at that college in some time.  Yesterday, I--and they--realized that I knew all of their names!


What makes it so odd is that the school already feels like it's in the past for me.  That's how I feel when I'm anywhere on the campus besides my class.  I noticed that when I bumped into two women I hadn't seen, probably, in about two years.  Back when I was an academic advisor and, later, director of the tutoring center, I used to see them all of the time: One is a supervisor in the financial aid office, and the other directs the office of student services.  Both seemed happy, and surprised, to see me and gave me longer and more emphatic hugs than I could have anticipated.


They have never been anything but kind to me.  But, in some strange way, they felt like memories at the very moment I was talking with them.  Perhaps they were:  Perhaps I was talking to a memory I had of them, and they were talking to the way they remembered me.  Not that I disliked any of it.  However, I did have the sense that I might not see them again.  


The director of student said, "It has to be about two years since I've seen you.  Something about you has changed."  I mentioned that it's been almost two years--already!--since I've had my surgery. "Yes!  The last time I saw you, you were about to have it," exclaimed the woman from Financial Aid.


Now I am recalling the other times I felt as I did upon seeing those women:  the months, the weeks, the days before my graduations--from high school, from college, from graduate school.  In each of those situations, I had the feeling, as I did yesterday, that those situations were already in the past, that I had in a sense, already graduated--or left, at any rate.  


In high school and college, I knew I was just biding time:  In other words, I was warehoused.  In high school, I had to stay because the law said I had to in order to graduate; in college, I was merely getting enough credits to graduate, having already completed my major and distribution requirements.


On the other hand, as I neared the end of graduate school, I had the sense that I was beginning something that I couldn't have continued, much less completed, there.   Turned out, there were a whole bunch of things.  True, I was finishing some course work and my thesis.  But I didn't feel that those were, or had anything to do with, the tasks I could see before me.  


If anything, what I felt yesterday was more like what I felt toward the end of graduate school.  In other words, I feel more of a sense of moving on--and, hopefully, ahead--rather than leaving.  I have been at that college for six years --which, even at this point in my life, seems like a geological age.  When I entered, I had been living as a woman, as Justine, for not much more than a year.  I was grateful that I had a job and could work in relative peace, under a department head--I'll call her Claire--who was friendly and supportive.   Now it has been nearly two years since my operation.  Claire has retired and much in the college--and the department in which I've worked--has changed.  The charming, quirky dysfunction one finds in so many departments and colleges has turned into something that is more disorienting, and even vicious.  I've never been in any other place where people get as defensive when you ask a question, and I'm not used to people filing charges against people over a simple disagreement. 


I simply can't see how I can develop, personally or professionally, in such an environment.  At least, I can't see how that place can help me to become anything I'd want to become, as a woman or a professional.  


I feel more like a stranger in that place than I did on the first day I spent there.  The women I saw yesterday are not among the reasons why.  They are simply two more people there, and they are--from what I can tell--working for a pension.  The one from Financial Aid will probably get hers fairly soon; the woman from Student Services has at least a few more years.  They know what their futures will be; I am just starting to understand what mine could be.

At The End of 2010: Leaving The Past, Again

Nobody I know seems sorry that 2010 is ending.  I realized this tonight, when Mom, Dad and I were having dinner at the Mezza Luna restaurant (highly recommended!) in the European Village of Palm Coast.  The owner, who greeted customers after they were seated, said he was worried about business earlier this month. The economy is bad everywhere, but particularly in Florida.  It might be better here than in Detroit, but that's like saying that the North Pole isn't as cold as the South Pole.

I won't say "good riddance" to this year.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't awful, either.  More than anything, I'd say this was a transitional, or perhaps developmental, year.  It was my first full year after my operation, which means that I am still learning new things about my body, myself and my world.  Probably the most important change I'm seeing is in the ways in which I see other people. 

Probably the most interesting, and sometimes difficult, thing I've learned is how to look at my past without either hatred or sentimentality.  In some ways, what I had thought of as my past wasn't really mine after all.  I have come to suspect that, at least to some degree, this is the experience of most women.  As she was leaving Torvald, Nora (in A Doll's House) said that she went from being her father's property to Torvald's property.  Her ideas, opinions and wishes--and her very life itself--were therefore never her own; she took secondhand versions of what those two men in her life offered, if she got anything at all.

My life, before my transition, was a variation on that:  I was trying to fit, or make myself fit into, the ideas, wishes, wants, dreams and accomplishments of men, most of whom I didn't even know.  All I knew was that they didn't fit me any more than I could fit into them.  I could no more become the military officer my father had wanted me to become (To his credit, I think he came to understand that.) than I could become the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  It wasn't only a matter of being more than a foot shorter than the basketball legend; it also a matter of my emotional--and, according to the medical tests I would undergo much later---hormonal makeup.

Now I am just beginning to discover what my strengths as well as my interests are.  I don't know how long I will continue to do that:  In some ways it's exhiliarating, but at other times I wish I could be more settled.  But then again, I sometimes think that I always was and always will be in a state of flux.

So 2010 was a year of transition and development.  It's probably the sort of year I needed to have.

Moving On At The End Of Daylight Savings Time

Tonight--or, more precisely, at two o'clock tomorrow morning--Daylight Savings Time ends.  That means the clocks are turned back an hour.


That is particularly ironic for me.  As I have described in earlier posts, various parts of my life are moving forward, whether or not as a result of my doing.  And, as I have also described, I do not have the option of going back, even if I wanted to do such a thing.


My working life, if nothing else, is making that abundantly clear.  I am teaching in two places where nobody --at least, nobody who had any authority to interview or schedule me--knew me.  And, save for one prof at the technical institute who knew me from long ago, I have not talked about my past with anyone.  And I didn't talk about my transition with him:  He seemed to know more or less what I did, and he has only a vague memory of the person who once shared a desk with him at John Jay College, where I taught just after I finished graduate school.  So much has passed since then!


Meanwhile, something even stranger is happening at my main job.  It's as if people are moving forward in my life--my previous life, that is--without me in it.  What's even stranger is that I'm not upset with them because, really, I don't have the choice--no, the luxury--of doing so.   Yes, I did suggest that the college could use an LGBT organization (The college is part of a university that includes twenty other colleges and is the only college among them that doesn't have an LGBT organization.)  and volunteered to do the work to organize, and enlist support, for it.  The college's administration thought it "too controversial" (What city are we in?  What century?) and not only nixed the idea, but cast aspersions on me for suggesting it.  Now they're willing to support other profs in doing it, and I really am not interested in it now.  I don't know what I'd say if those profs approached me to work with them on it.  


It's not a matter of "sour grapes."  Rather, I have come to realize that the college is so decidedly un-progressive in its attitude toward LGBT people, and much else.  So, I have to wonder just how much the college administration is willing to support those profs who are talking about starting an organization.  And, quite frankly, my interests and energies are moving in other directions.  I'm finding that there's not much, if anything, I can do about that.


The same holds true about a hip-hop institute I suggested while I was teaching a course in the poetics and rhetoric of that art-form.  Other profs are probably going to run with it; they can have it because, even though I suggested it, I feel that the idea is not mine anymore.  Or, at least, I don't feel as if I have a place in it.


On the other hand, at the technical institute and at the other college, I really don't feel any compulsion--for now, anyway--to do more than to teach and be a supportive presence for whoever may need or want it.  I don't yet know whether there are any "in" or "out" groups in either place, and if there are, I may not need to know, at least not yet.  In contrast, I now realize that at my main job, even though I have been involved in two committees and a number of other activities, and gained respect for my teaching, I was never one of the "cool kids," if you will.  And, what I learned is that it's the sort of place in which that's exactly what you have to be, or become.  You know whether or not that has happened if you are part of a clique.  I'm not, and that's why I actually feel more like an outsider at that college than I did on the day I started there almost six years ago.


As I describe all of those things, they already feel like part of the past and are unchangeable in the same way. You don't grow up by trying to change your childhood; you use what you can from it to help you move forward.  There are times when that college feels like as much a part of my past as junior high school, to which I have compared the college.  (I've also compared it to a juvenile detention center, as the power relationships operate in almost exactly the same way as those among detained adolescents.)  Some people there are proceeding without me; I am moving in the direction in which I need to move.


They say the fall is a time of change.  Indeed it is.  The end of Daylight Savings Time is part of it.

They're Doing What I Said They Should...Without Me.

At my regular job, I bumped into a prof I used to see regularly but hadn't seen in some time.  Neither of us was avoiding the other (At least, I wasn't avoiding him); we merely have been on incompatible schedules.


As far as I know, he's straight.  However, he is very interested in LGBT issues.  He teaches a class in human sexuality, in which I have guest-lectured.  (Yes, I really am an expert on the subject! ;-) )  His students revere him; I think I would, too, if I were in one of his classes.


We caught up on one thing and another when he mentioned that the college is "throwing its support behind" a group of profs who want to start an LGBT group which would include students as well as faculty members.  


When I proposed the same a while back, the college president said that it would be "too controversial."  And the provost simply didn't want to hear about it.  When I mentioned this to the college's legal and compliance officer (what used to be known as the "affirmative action officer"), she said, with a straight face, "You or anyone else is free to start any organization you wish on this campus."


In the meantime, three professors--two of them long tenured--"came out" to me.  Their identities were not news to me--after all, trannies have "gaydar," too--but I was disturbed when they swore me to secrecy.  Not that I'd want to tell everyone.  Rather, I was disturbed that they all said they "didn't feel safe."  


I wonder if any of those profs are behind the effort to start the new organization.  


Ironically enough, I'm less interested now in starting such an organization.  One reason is that I'm not happy about the way I found out about the initiative, even if the news came from a prof I like and respect.  Another, and perhaps more important reason, is that I simply feel less like I want to become involved in such things.  Maybe I'm falling into a mentality I've seen other trans women fall into after they have their surgeries and settle into their new lives.  That mentality is one borne of a feeling of no longer having such a strong common bond with the L's, the G's, the B's or even the T's who haven't come as far along in their transitions.


Someone warned me that a day like this would come.  On one hand, I cannot deny what I've experienced, especially those ways in which my past differs from that of most women with XX chromosomes.  On the other, I remind myself that I took hormones, had the surgery and made all of the other changes I've made so that I could live as a woman--not as a transgender.