Girlfriends

Last night I was listening to a song by Mana. I closed my eyes and picked out the various parts – two acoustic guitars, keyboard, bass, drums and percussion – hearing how they played off each other and blended into this incredible beauty of sound. I thought of how Kristin and the boys are learning music, and often play together both with Ken, their teacher, and with each other in practice. I thought how much fun it would be to join with them, though I've been resisting for some time now because I just don't have the time to learn music. Then I reflected on the many times I've tried to learn to play an instrument – drums, guitar, banjo, jews harp, harmonica. I never learned any of them, and thinking back, it seems to me the reason is I never played with anyone else. I never got lessons, never played with peers. For me, like everything else, learning music was a solitary experience.

Then I got to thinking about why that might be. Part of it – maybe most of it – is because I never had friends I could share that with. I noticed that my entire life, I could make only the most shallow friendships, because my primary goal in any relationship was to protect myself – to avoid revealing who I really am, to keep my deepest thoughts and desires secret to myself alone.

The overriding reason I wanted to keep myself private was shame.

I was so deeply ashamed of myself for those thoughts, desires, and experiences that reflect who I am. I was ashamed because I saw that my own experience was so different from everyone else's; because I simply could not relate those thoughts, desires, and experiences to the male role models in my life – at least, not in a deep, personal, and gendered way.

While there are many activities in life that are not gendered – woodworking, chess, gardening, the list goes on forever – there are no relationships that are not gendered. I relate differently depending on who I'm relating with, and gender is part of that relation. Even my relationship with myself is gendered. Women relate differently when they are in a women only group vs. mixed company, men do the same. Mostly, I think, people accept these differences for granted, perhaps don't even notice them. For me, they dominated every social experience.

Because I was so deeply ashamed of who I was, I tried to relate to people according to my sex, and because doing so meant I could not relate in a genuinely gendered way, I could not reveal enough of who I was, even with my most intimate friends, to share real intimacy.

In short, I never learned how to be a friend. Others related with me in the fullness of who they are, and I responded with a deep reserve and definite deception. I related with a mask, an assumed persona I'd pieced together to disguise my real self.

As I reflected on my current life, this became very clear, because I am finally learning how to be, and what it means to be, a friend. It's a matter of baby-steps, of stumbling in the dusk. I still don't have the basic skills of friendship down, by any means. However, I am relating in the wholeness of who I am, and that is bringing incredible changes.

I have real women friends now. These are the people most responsible for my new growth. This is the growing richness of my life. Girlfriends. I am finally welcomed into the social role where I belong. No longer am I isolated, an outsider in every social situation, an interloper who feels out of place. I can be myself, and people actually like me.

I cannot relate to you how incredibly beautiful that is, to belong, to be myself, to relate to others as fully human. This is the best thing, for me, about my transition. Women friends. Honesty. Relating fully, no longer isolated and alone, no longer a square peg in a round hole, but real, comfortable. I am just me. I cannot find words to express the sense of wholeness I have found. It is a pearl of great price.

To the extent that my body does not match my gender, it affects how people relate to me. But the need for human, intimate connection is so great and so basic to our humanity, to feeling and expressing love, so essential to our development and survival, that I will change my body as much as I possibly can to achieve that fullness of social connection. I cannot do otherwise. I am amazed that I stayed alive for so long without that intimacy. Kristin is responsible, of course. I was able to forge a relationship, cobbled together out of my deceptive persona and elements of my real self, with her that was sufficiently intimate to survive, and her love sustained me for 15 years. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that if I had not transitioned, I would now be dead. I simply could not survive in that vacuum of my own soul, in that social and personal isolation, much longer.

There are still a lot of aspects of being transgendered that suck. I hate parts of my body. They betray me. They are completely dysfunctional to who I am. Every day, throughout the day, they rear up and show me how still incomplete are my social relations. The pain of them is constant and unremitting. God, how I wish I could change them! But they do not dominate my life. I have hope. I have meaning. I have girlfriends.

More on Coming Out

Recently Fannie (of Fannie's Room) kindly invited me to share my coming out story, as part of her "Coming Out" series of guest posts. (The link above is to Part II, because she starts with a link to Part I and Part I doesn't link back.)

I give kudo's to Fannie for the idea, and for following through with it, of publishing a series of coming out stories. As I've said before, there is great power in coming out. I believe it is the most powerful assurance LGBT people have of creating acceptance and the embrace of society, and, ultimately, equality. More than the courts, more than anything. Honesty is - well, honorable. And it makes a difference. Fannie's doing her part, and her willingness to publish a wide variety of coming out stories, including those of lesbians, gays, transpeople, and even straight people, is deeply appreciated.

New Year's Resolution

Organize. Focus. Write.

'Nuff said.

Laramie

I think Laramie gets a bad rap from the Matthew Shepard case, yet one that is also understandable and has an element of truth. I haven't been there much at all since 1977 – I think maybe three times, and it has undoubtedly changed a lot over the years.

The Laramie schools of my day were filled with animosity between "farmers" and "hippies," but the people I knew (especially the adults) tended to be honest, hard-working people. Yes, they had a code that they lived by, and by that code I would have been a real freak had I allowed myself to be recognized for it. Yet I also find much to respect and honor in that code and those people. I think there was also a strain of tolerance that went deep. The people there didn't like others dictating their lives, and they had, mostly, a real "live and let live" attitude. The adults would have thought I was a freak, but most of them would have shrugged their shoulders and said something like, "To each his own."

Meanwhile, the land etched itself into my soul. When I think of Laramie, I think much more of the land than the people, because the land dominated the people. In my mind, I mostly see Laramie as a thin dark line far across the prairie, in the shadow of the Laramie Range, from a rocky outcrop on Jelm Mountain – my backyard playground from the age of about 10 to 16. I think of the antelope flashing their white butts and dashing away. Mule deer bucks fighting over a doe. The wind howling across the plains and covering them in a moving blanket of snow three feet high during ground blizzards. The incredible feast of stars on a moonless winter night. Laramie is 7500 feet high, close to 8000 where I grew up, and the stars there are incredible. The Milky Way was my companion, a white path across the sky, and not the pathetic pale splotch it is around here.

The truth is, I was a lonely child. My cat and my horse were my best companions, my best friends. With them, it didn't matter who I was – or what. It didn't even matter that I didn't know. I was certainly alienated from the people around me. When we moved in 1977, I never had one person I was tempted to write, except the old rancher who taught me woodworking in 4-H. Certainly no friends of my own age. I didn't make friendships, didn't even know what they were.

As I write this, I realize that perhaps the social aspect is crueler than I understood, or understand today. I think for me, Laramie is a place, and not the people who reside there. And it's a place I love deeply. So I have this deep ambivalence. Laramie, for me, was a social hell, and a spiritual paradise.

Friends and a Far Way

Last night my mother-in-law came to visit, and Kristin and I left her with the kids and went to a play put on by our local high school. One of the actors was formerly Kristin's student, and we enjoyed watching him perform. In the years since he was a troubled pre-schooler under Kristin's tutelage he's become a big, talented sophomore. He yelled out when he saw Kristin after the show, hugged her, then turned to me – and hugged me, too. I was accepted and embraced by all at this performance, including the significant crowd of women who mobbed the ladies' room during intermission.

Later on in the evening, after spending a crazy hour at home, I lay in bed and thought about my life. I gave thanks. And I thought about what I want.

I am most comfortable when I forget my body and feel myself completely female and socially embraced as such, in whatever social role or event that might be. There is something jarring and profoundly disturbing about becoming aware of my body as a male part of me. This is a measure of how the extent that my body and my soul/mind integrate. To the extent that I perceive my body as male, I cannot integrate at all; I am faced with an unresolvable incongruity, and this incongruity rocks the foundations of my identity, my self, my world. It is completely disorienting, perhaps like it would be to live in a world without gravity. For years I lived a coward's life, trying to resolve the incongruity by forcing my mind to accept – tolerate – the role that was expected – that I expected – of my body. All it did was drive me to within the thought of its effect on Kristin and my children away from suicide.

One of the transwomen I admire the most is my friend Tobi. She appears to be completely comfortable in her skin. She makes no effort at all to hide the butch side of her, nor the fact that her body is genetically male. She even lets a dusting of whiskers stay on her chin. As far as I can see, she has integrated her body and soul, resolving the conundrum by recognizing her male body as female.

Be patient. I'm working my way to a point.

The performance we saw last night was Rent. One of the most memorable lines, for me, was from Angel, who is described as a "gay drag queen." My perception from the acting was that she was transgendered – not necessarily transsexual, but certainly female gendered, and as such, I didn't have the sense that she would be gay, even with a male lover. Anyway, the line was given as the characters mourned her death, and one of them mentioned her going up to a "skinhead" who was harassing her and saying, "I'm more of a man than you'll ever be, and I'm more of a woman than you'll ever get."

Those words resonate with me.

I would really like to integrate to the point that I can look at and feel the "male" aspects of my body and yet perceive them as female – as part of me, and not this separate entity that has nothing to do with me at all except that it's an inadequate vessel that carries me from place to place. Ideally, everyone around me would perceive the same thing – not that I have a male body, or even that I'm trans, but just that I'm a woman with a mildly misshapen body. I want to live the deep, connected friendships that are unique among women.

I think it's possible. I've had a few glimpses over the last week, when I almost get the sense that my penis is a female part, or when I just melt into my role as a woman.

And I have friends. Oh, I have friends. My own mother-in-law has embraced me, and likes Seda better than her former son-in-law. Anne, and Davin, and Ilana, and Kristin, all have embraced me into that magical circle of feminine friendship. It will happen with others. It appears to be more difficult with people who knew me before transition, which isn't surprising.

And rising from the ashes of that fake male persona I used to wear, is the phoenix of something new, something precious – a deep, fierce pride in who I am. In being a transwoman. (See Angel's words, above.)

I do not deny who I am. No, I embrace it.

So far I have come. I'm on a path, creating a life that is, as I am, beautiful.

And if that's a paradox – well, shit, my whole life is a paradox!

Birthday Girl!

It's my birthday, and the full moon. So I'm taking a day off, sort of, from blogging. Just this little note, a celebration!

Peace, everyone! Be well.

Dysphoria

One of the best things about blogs is that you can put anything you want to on your blog. I just wrote a poem, so I’m gonna post it because I feel like it. Then you can experience one of the best things about poetry (mine, anyway), which is that you don’t have to read it. I have some great links down below on the left…

Dysphoria

This psychic itch leaves no peace.
It aches when lovers hold hands, snuggle close and touch lips; a hand on her butt, the little arch of a woman’s head leaning close.

There is no scratching it, reaching under a turtleneck, or behind my back where my bra fastens and my fingers don’t reach. The only way to overcome the itch move my brain away from my body, sex, now to esoteric, spiritual, material and not connected to me.

It itches in the ladies' room, strong now, can’t ignore it.
Still can’t scratch it.
Forget it. Focus on not my face not my hands on chocolate.

Chocolate is the same in any body, melts in the mouth to forget.

Beautiful woman and the itch goes deep that could be me could be not not not Look away, the sun is shining, blue sky smiles.

And that cute guy, the itch reaches deep deep a hollow
in the belly dancer deeper no escape.

No nails, no fingers can scratch this itch, no, it takes a scalpel.
Just want to scratch.

Make it stop.

Some of My Heroes

• Gandhi
• Julia Butterfly Hill
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Marshall Rosenberg
• Harriet Tubman
• Mary Baker Eddy
• Sylvia Rivera
• Henry David Thoreau
• Kristin
• Bonnie Tinker
• Lynn Conway

Strength

I recently discovered I can no longer pull back the string on my compact bow. One of the side effects of estrogen is that you lose upper body muscle mass, and therefore strength, and the consequence of that is that I no longer have the physical strength to pull back a 75 pound force.

I guess it's time to sell the bow.

Ironically, since taking estrogen, I have become far stronger than I ever was when testosterone was ravaging my body and mind.

I am stronger because now I move in confidence and integrity. It is an inner strength that has grown so much. I know that I am capable of so much more than I have ever before committed, and that strength grows as I integrate deeper into my new role in life. My intention is no longer distracted by depression, despair, and shame. I have the strength of self love, and of deepening love for others and the world.

It is the difference between violent force and nonviolent force. Gandhi said that nonviolent force is the greatest force on our earth, Jesus demonstrated it, and I believe them.

God, I'm happy.

Gifts

There have been difficulties and wrinkles, of course. I haven't been able to complete all the tasks I would like to have completed, in particular a project for a friend and more blog posts. Several happily anticipated social events have been canceled or rescheduled. Today I suffered a migraine for a few hours, and Kristin has a cold. Yet this week has been a wonder, of sorts.

Part of it is a sense that I am passing. Strangers treat me more and more frequently to "ma'am" or "she" or, speaking to their children, "Say ___ to the lady." (A mixed blessing, that. I'd rather the child's response be genuine, and I'd like to see her enjoying autonomy, yet I also enjoy the treatment of me and understand the parents' concern to guide their child in the social graces.)

Part of it is a sense of my own developing social grace, and the warmth of friendship coming at me from many angles. A delicious email from my niece. I am loved, and my own love is richly received.

And it was fun to win the table topics at my Toastmasters club – for the first time!

But I think perhaps most of all, it is the epiphany, or intuition, or realization I had in an empathy session with a dear friend: I am fully woman as I am, no matter what my body reflects. I don't have to change anything, and that will always still be true. For a moment, I could love and accept my body. I got beyond the sense of being defined by my body, and that sense lingers on.

I sat with it, with gratitude filling my heart.

The gratitude, the joy, lingers on as well.

Followup to Childhood

Two years ago, on a trip east to attempt reconciliation with my father, I visited the old Sodergreen Ranch. It had changed. A rich construction magnate from California bought out three of the working ranches there, including that one, and lives in a fancy new house without ranching the land. He just drives around in his earth-moving vehicles, tearing things up.

The log house I lived in – a beautiful building with dovetailed joints and fourteen rooms – had burned down years ago, and was replaced with a mobile home.

The old wood bridge where we used to read in the summer sun, or fish, or play, had washed out, and was replaced with a narrow, nasty construct of concrete, as friendly as a slap in the face.

The barn was cold and empty. The old cabin we lived in before moving to the big log house had been hauled away. Most of the corrals and sheds had been destroyed.

All but one of the old ranchers and cowboys I grew up with were gone. Instead, the prairie between Laramie and the ranch was dotted with ugly prefabricated houses on tiny lots.

God knows why anyone would want to live that way. In that country, three acres is barely enough for a goat, and on the prairie, there's no shelter from the wind.

Only the land remained.

I walked across the bridge, through the hay meadow and over the beaver dam on the slough, and then across the prairie to Jelm Mountain. I climbed all the way to the top.

It was like land that man forgot, owned by God and his creatures. Deer and antelope were everywhere. Several times I approached fawns to within twenty feet. As I crossed the slough, a moose waded from the water.

I tried to recapture my connection to that land, but I have changed, and my former connection was intertwined with the rest of my childhood. I didn't have the days it would take to rebuild the connection, and left disturbed, dissatisfied, and deeply sad.

Recapturing childhood

Last night I dreamed, and woke with the taste of the Sodergreen Ranch on my tongue - the flavor of my childhood.

I grew up on the banks of the Laramie River where it slows out of the Snowy Range onto the Laramie Plain. From six to sixteen, I lived in log homes built by Swede settlers in the 1890's, uninsulated and so cold in winter that once a glass of water in my bedroom froze so hard it broke.

It is a harsh and beautiful landscape. To the northwest, the steep slope of Sheep Mountain, fringed with lodgepole pine along the top. The Snowy Range rears its peaks, shining white even in summer, west of the cottonwoods that line the river. South, gentler, wooded Jelm Mountain, with glints of gold from the aspens in fall, and beyond that the Neversummer Range and Bull Mountain in Colorado. And then the wide, flat arc of the prairie, from south to east and back to north, where the wind howls down from the mountains so hard that it blows semi-trucks off the Interstate, twenty-five miles away. Over all, the great blue bowl of the sky.

As the dreamweb broke in my mind, I traveled back in time and tried to recapture something special that I sensed in my childhood. The emotions that rose were helplessness, powerlessness, despair, and great love, and peace in the solace of nature and the large warm body of a black horse named, in a child's ignorance, Nig.

I have a deep sense of ambivalence about that time. The conflict with my father raged at its worst, and was most one-sided, from when I was about eight until we moved from there and I got big enough to defy him openly. With adolescence and puberty, my gender dysphoria became a defining reality that tortured my inner life until I started drinking and doing drugs, and buried my true self in denial. Confusion, loneliness, and ridicule filled my school days as I struggled to adjust to the role society assigned to me, even as I didn't understand it. I struggle with these feelings still; helplessness, rage, confusion, loneliness, despair.

At the same time, my childhood grips me with amazing power. The landscape etched itself into my soul. It is harsh, but beautiful beyond compare. I spent days fishing in the river and wandering across the prairie and foothills, and evenings listening to the eerie call of the coyotes and watching the nighthawks swoop overhead, or sitting on the side of a hill watching beavers mend their dam in the twilight. I rode my horse bareback across the plains, held my cheek warm against his neck. I explored the willows and cottonwoods along the river, watching for the big mule deer with their strange, bounding run. Once, on the side of Jelm Mountain, I saw a pair of bucks fight over a doe.

I long to recapture the intimate connection I had with that magical landscape; the way I fit into the palm of nature's hand, struggling only to meld myself with the mystery of river and prairie and sky. And I cannot recapture it, for it is lost in place and time, and intertwined with the social destitution I experienced, the awful confusion of being different and not knowing how or why. Even as I mourn the loss, I would be loath to surrender the self-knowledge, unity, and social connection I have now.

Yet I am grateful for my childhood, and would trade it for no other; perhaps because it feels good to have survived such suffering and overcome it, but more, I think, simply for the rare privilege of sinking roots into that thin and rocky soil.

Where Has Seda Been?

Well you might ask. I kind of wonder, myself.

I feel like I've been in a perfect storm, but in fact I've simply been home by myself. K and the boys are away, visiting her mom down in California. So, a week to my own devices. Freedom. Lots of time to do whatever. Right?

Yes and no.

I kinda didn't realize how many critters we've accumulated over the last year or so - two sets of bunnies, chickens, a rat, a fish. The fish doesn't take much, and I take care of the chickens anyway. I tried to let the bunnies out for a graze, and one of freaked out and kicked around and almost got away and made deep bloody scratches on the back of my hand. Then I tried to feed the rat some cheese, and she decided to take a bite out of me instead. I jerked my hand back, and the rat came with it. She flew through the air – Splat! On the floor. Poor thing. While she stumbled about drunkenly exploring her broken teeth (not really), I grabbed her by the tail and put her back in.

Then there's the garden. K set up all kinds of irrigation systems to make the watering easier. It's a good thing. If I had to handwater everything like last year, Kristin would come home to a desert. As it is, it feels like all I do is go from hose to hose, switching water around from here to there…

But I get to harvest it, right?

Too right. Endless strawberries, raspberries, peas, the lettuce and chard are bolting, fields of favas – I've eaten fava beans four days in a row, and it looks like I haven't touched the crop yet – and that counts the two bags I gave away. The very act of harvesting the bounty is overwhelming. There is simply no way I can keep up with it. Even the slugs are overmatched.

So tonight I made a salad for tomorrow's lunch. Three kinds of lettuce, steamed fava beans, and hard boiled eggs – every bit of it grown in our own backyard.

When I look at what Kristin has accomplished with growing food this year, I'm impressed. When I try to keep it going, I'm exhausted.

The Mule Kicks Ass

Friday night, June 20, Government Mule and Ratdog kicked off their Mighty High Summer Tour at the Cuthbert Amphitheater in Eugene, Oregon. I was there, sitting or dancing in the grass close to the bleachers, directly in front of center stage. On one side my brother peered through his high-class binoculars, on the other my niece and nephew texted each other, thumbs flying, while watching the band. Some of Sam's other friends and family sat on either side. As the sound flowed through me, I smiled so much my cheeks started aching.

I love music. I love rock 'n' roll. And these guys rocked.

Now, I've been a Grateful Dead fan for a very long time. I've spent countless hours listening to Jerry's sweet guitar licks and the Dead's endless jams that end too soon. I've crossed at least six state lines listening to just "Goin' Down the Road," not to mention all the other great songs. I think Bob Weir is great. My ticket says only that "Bob Weir & Ratdog will be playing – doesn't even mention Government Mule. And Ratdog did some great jams late in the show.

But… the Mule kicked their ass with a steady stream of electrifying, straight up rock 'n' roll.

With the late solstice-eve sun blazing in their faces, and the heat of the day still strong, sweat soaking their clothing, and clouds of marijuana smoke blowing over the crowd, the Mule played their heart out. I couldn't keep my feet still. I didn't try. I loved watching the drummer and guitarist playing off each other. I just let the long week's work bleed away and lived in the moment, completely absorbed in the music.

I didn't get down in the mosh pit in front of the band, but my brother's friend and his son did. It paid off. Thirteen-year-old Odin caught one of Warren Hayes' guitar picks. And Terry caught both of Matt Abts' battered drumsticks, one of them signed, and snagged one of the band's playlists for the show.

Sweet.

Jimi Hendrix as Moral Choice

"Authoritarian parents … not only offer minimal opportunities for children to choose, but tend to treat matters of taste or personal style as if they were moral issues with a single right answer – an answer that must, of course, be provided by the parent." Alfie Kohn, in Unconditional Parenting, p. 180.

When I read this, I felt a sudden hollow ache in my solar plexus. It went beyond emotional, to physical sensation. The pain that came up surprised me in its intensity. I hadn't realized how much hurt, how much resentment and anger and grief still remain, buried deep inside me.

When I first heard Jimi Hendrix's fantastical guitar licks, way back around 1971 or so, when I was 11, I was blown away. It touched my soul, and still resonates deep inside. (I'm listening to him now, as I have many times when emotional pain rears its ugly head.)

My dad viewed it as a personal affront, not just a difference in taste - a deeply immoral offense, perhaps akin to shoplifting, or giving drugs to children. He liked Hank Williams, Sr., and clearly expected me to do the same. The music that rocked my world was viewed as my choice to totally reject everything good and honest and pure.

I couldn't choose my clothes. My haircut. My glasses. If I resisted, it was not a matter of personal taste, but a moral decision akin to choosing evil.

He showed no sense of curiosity about who I was, no interest in me as my own person. I had the sense I was created to allow him to vicariously live the childhood he wished he'd had.

And my god, it hurt. It still hurts. It hurts with a deep dull ache that will not go away.

Double Standard

Transwomen of my generation, and particularly my subculture (rural Wyoming) grew up with a poisonous double standard. Among my peers, girls who were tomboys were respected. Boys who liked girl things were 'sissies,' treated with the ultimate in contempt, and subject to merciless ridicule.

I can't speak for how that double standard affected transboys, or cisgirls or boys. I never shared their experience. Yet I suspect that the girls I grew up with felt that double standard sharply.

I do know, though, that for me, it was incredibly painful. I learned very young to be deeply ashamed of who I was, and I desperately struggled to hide that person. It came out occasionally in unsuspecting ways – I still remember, early in grade school, being ridiculed for 'throwing like a girl.' I didn't know that's what I was doing; I was just throwing normally. Following my nature. I watched boys throw and learned to throw like them, and practiced for hours throwing rocks to get it right.

Adolescence was pure hell. I hear all the time from cisgendered folks that adolescence was just as bad for them, that it's hard on everyone. Sure it's hard on everyone. But I don't believe it was – is – as tough for cisgendered folks as it is for transpeople. Particularly transwomen of my age. I hid my self, even from myself; created a front to show the world – a three-dimensional cartoon of a boy – and lived in desperate loneliness. Somewhere around the age of 15 or 16 I just shut down emotionally, went into denial, and started drinking and doing drugs. I did everything I could to prove I was a man. Prove it to others, and prove it to myself. I fooled everyone else pretty easily (I had the perfect disguise), but, unable to successfully prove it to myself, I lived in an emotional vacuum – isolated, invisible and ashamed in a prison of my own making. It took 14 years to stop burying my emotions in alcohol, and another 12 years after that, in the company of an incredible and beautiful woman, before the epiphany that I was okay – that I really was a girl – a woman – and I didn't have to pretend to be somebody I'm not. I didn't have to live in pain and isolation. I started to love myself, and so didn't need to lie to get the love of others.

Twenty-six years is a long time to live in purgatory.

And I can't help but wonder how much of that is a direct result of the double standard in which I grew up. The cruel, destructive double standard that says that boys are better than girls.

It ain't true. I know. I'm a woman. And I'm a man, too. I've seen both sides. I've seen the brutal and the venal, the love and gentleness. Man and woman are two sides of the same coin, and neither is better or worse than the other. Even those of us who live on the edge of the coin – transpeople – are no better or worse.

And society will go far in reducing pain and violence for everyone when everyone is finally accepted at equal value, regardless of their gender.

An Examined Life

Someone – I think it was one of the famous old Greek philosophers – once said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I suppose he was partly right – if I hadn’t spent enough time staring at my navel to figure out that I’m a woman, I’d probably have killed myself by now. But he sure didn’t have it all right; or, at least, he didn’t include the need for balance.

The truth of the matter is, the more I examine my life, the closer to despair I go. I see what I’ve missed in life, how I’ve been socialized, how inadequate – no, not inadequate, just wrong – my body is, how difficult social situations are, how impossible it is to be seen for who I am – and I’ve got nowhere to go but down. It’s really easy to go down that road. When I’m by myself, when my activity is not fully engaging, my attention automatically goes to introspection, then anxiety or despair.

There’s a better way – getting outside myself. By whatever means, just move my focus from my navel to the outside. I’ve found a bunch of ways to do that. It can be as simple as a game of chess, or sudoku. It can be a task that I enjoy, or that is engaging – writing, blogging, designing, building.

But my favorite is to spend time with my girlfriends. How blessed it is to find them! Women who recognize me for who I am, and who welcome me into their circle, as one of them. And, since my transition, I’m further blessed, because there are so many – including the one I live with.

And if that isn’t enough, when some navel-gazing is in order, there are trans friends who understand my experience. Shared introspection gives me a chance to process it all outside of myself, where despair turns into hope.

Considering the End

One of my primary goals in starting this blog was to connect more effectively with more of my family and friends. The cost, in making a more public communication, was to make a less personal communication. I hoped that would be an acceptable tradeoff, so that I could reach more people. I've received very little feedback or response, and most of that from someone I try to correspond with regularly anyway. So I wonder if my time and energy won't be better spent in some other endeavor.

Frankly, I'm disappointed in my ability to elicit a response, and discouraged by my failure to create a dialogue. It seems that either I've got no readers, or else my writing doesn't strike a chord. In either case, again, my energy is probably better spent elsewhere.

So I think I'll take a little time and consider whether my goals and intentions for the blog can be adjusted to a strictly one-way communication - a sort of public processing of my emotional turmoil, tossed blindly into the ether - or whether to close it down and seek connection on a more personal level. Perhaps by making more visits to my therapist.

Doulas and crying

Kristin is out of town, helping an old, dear friend give birth to her first baby. I’m so glad and proud that I can support her, taking the boys alone while she performs her doula duties. That support is my gift, as well as hers.

And yet, telling my neighbor about it on the phone, I felt like crying.

I felt like crying because, when I said that Kristin birthed her babies quickly, I felt like I should be saying that about me, too. And when I spoke of her client laboring for over 24 hours, I felt like I should be saying that about me, too.

But I can’t.

It seems so wrong, so surreal, that I can be such a woman, and yet have a body that won’t do woman things.

It’s a hollowness, an ache, a loss that cannot be contained.

Thank god for the boys. At least I can mother them.

An introduction of sorts...

My name is Seda. I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming among the last of the old cowboys who formed the macho basis for the Marlboro Man myth. Those folks were my folks; those people, my people. The first time I remember snitching and wearing my sister’s clothes, I was maybe six years old.

I’ve read plenty of accounts by other transwomen that they knew from their childhood that they were girls. I never had that sense growing up. Everyone around me bombarded me with the message, “You’re a boy,” and like so many children, I never questioned the parents and adults and peers who defined my world. I did know from the earliest age, however, that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t fit in. I just thought it was my mind and spirit that were fucked up. From the perspective of forty years of experience, now I realize it was my body.

Given the deep inner knowledge that there was something lacking in my manhood, perhaps it’s no surprise that I joined the Marine Corps shortly after graduating from high school. Four years failed miserably to fulfill their promise to ‘Make a man out of me.’ I traveled the country, working in construction, logging, and other jobs for four more years, then signed on with a commercial fishing boat, where I racked up over three years of sea time. The photo above was taken while fishing for pacific cod in the Bering Sea in January, right after I’d worked several hours at the rail, my face lashed constantly by howling wind and freezing salt spray. The ice is, indeed, salt water ice.

I got married. I had kids, two boys. I had nightmares, indigestion, depression. And one night a house fire began the process that would change my life forever. In the aftermath of that fire, losing our house, nearly losing our lives, middle-age closing in around me, I took the opportunity of my wife’s and kids’ temporary absence to purchase a bunch of second-hand women’s clothes. For the week they were gone, I spent every second I was home in drag. And one night, dancing in joy down the hall, I looked down at the skirt swirling around my legs, and I knew – this was me. The scales of denial having fallen from my eyes, I could not turn back. Eighteen months of therapy didn’t affect the growing needs for unity and self-expression, for integrity, for understanding and being understood, seeing and being seen, that had been suppressed for so long.

I am a year into hormone therapy now, and the tender buds of my breasts are starting to show. My beard is mostly gone, along with the depression and nightmares that plagued me. My ears are pierced, my hair is growing, and I spend each day living a life as close to that of a woman as I am able. I like myself, I respect myself, I have finally found a way to live with truth and integrity. All it cost me was my wife, a few friends, my career, my privileged white-male status, dependable medical care covered by insurance, and almost my last surviving brother (but not quite, thank God). My relationships with my boys have improved, and I am still best friends with the woman who was my wife.

I do not regret, nor do I want to discard, my past as a male. But I am not a male. Neither will I ever be completely female - anatomy and 40 years of male socialization conspire against that. I am not man nor woman, but a little bit of both. I am something in-between – a transwoman. What the hell, didn’t God “male and female created he them?” (Italics mine.) Yes, Virginia, God made us transfolk, too, and She made us this way for a reason, though I’m damned if I have a clue what it is.

In her autobiography, Conundrum, Jan Morris said, “I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter of either science or social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels.” I don’t know about the divine allegory; unusual gift, perhaps. But the rest of it resonates with the deep truth of a life lived with the same challenge that dominates my presence. Regardless of my genetic makeup, my most earnest desire is to live my life, closely connected to my family and to society, in complete acceptance of my role as woman. I am not a man. My heart and my soul beat to the rhythm of my womanhood, and when the sexes separate, that is where I want to be.