Looking Back
This is the season for looking back, right? It has been an interesting year, to say the least... truthfully, the best year of my adult life.
On March 2nd, 2014, I stood up in front of my entire UU congregation and outed myself as being Trans, via the following reflection. Rereading it has made me cry.
I've come quite a distance since that moment. At that time, it was all very raw, very full of questions without answers. But being willing to start from there, openly - from a place of no assumptions or expectations - is what has made me able to move forward as honestly as I have. Looking back, I can see how far I've come in such a short time, toward knowing myself.
So today, again, I share this with you. I've changed only one thing, the name - I used my "mundane" name on that day. I'm still choosing for now to not include that information in this blog, though I suspect I eventually will.
Some of you were there. Some of you are "hearing" this for the first time. All of you are precious to me. Happy New Year, everyone. Remember that life always has surprises in store, and that the hardest ones to embrace are the ones that hold the truest transformative power. May all of your life-transitions be as fruitful as this one has been, and continues to be, for me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi, I’m Phoenix. You all know me. I’ve been here a while. I’ve shown you a lot about who I am. But not all of it. I’m musical, I’m intellectual, I’m a terrible ham. I’m openly gay, at least around here.
I am also Transgender, and that’s a subject I’ve kept mostly to myself.
You see me as female. I don’t see myself that way. I’ve known this since I was a teenager. I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to hide it... but I don’t exactly talk much about it either. And until recently, I hadn’t really thought very much about how that’s been affecting me. And in a way, affecting my community as well. Because I haven’t given you the chance to see me for who I really am, even if to do so might require a little stretching.
It’s too easy to step back from your own reality because you just get tired of dealing with it. The confused and skeptical looks. The way that everyday language suddenly becomes awkward. The way that friends become uncomfortable, hesitant about how to act around you. So most of the time I don’t correct the assumptions that people make. I don’t want to cause embarrassment - yours or mine. I don’t want to be someone who is unpleasant to be around because my very presence makes unusual social demands... because SO much of what we act out as gender roles in our society happens “under the radar”- things that we do or say automatically, without even realizing it. “Ladies first,” right? “Let me get that for you.” Oh, God.
It’s an interesting experience, trying to drive in the wrong lane, as if my life were a British car. Puberty is especially fun when your brain and Mother Nature disagree on what gender you are. It feels like living in a sci-fi movie where the aliens have taken control of your body... you see what’s happening but you can’t stop it. You’re experiencing a horror flick from the ~inside~ , wishing desperately that there was some way to just get up and walk out of the theater.
My way of “walking out" was pretty direct: as far as my physicality was concerned, I just ... shut down. Body? What body? In another exciting sci-fi plot twist, I became an entity without a physical being, just a mind somehow connected with a ghostly pair of hands that could manipulate the world, nothing really real below the neck. I’m fairly certain that my serious ongoing health problems today are in large part the result of approximately thirty years of pretending that I don’t have a body. Abusing my health? Eh. Physical pain? No big deal. Short of breath? Listen, breathing is highly overrated.
Clamp down on your physicality and you clamp down on your feelings, too. I have struggled since high school with depression - not just “the blues” where life feels vaguely unsatisfying for unknown reasons, but real deep-down depression characterized by a sort of rampant apathy, in which all the places where you used to be able to find joy in your soul are somehow locked up, inaccessible. In fact, all emotions are mere shadows of what they once were, the ghosts of pain and pleasure. It’s a fine solution. I could highly recommend depression as a simple fix for all life’s problems, except of course for these few unpleasant side effects.
Certainly, other factors contributed there as well. Sometimes I think my family had enough psychological “stuff" for any six families. In fact, there were enough other factors that I could easily make myself forget that gender was one of them. And in my adult life I gradually came to a series of compromises with gender, sometimes ignoring its existence, sometimes playing it like a game. It became an intellectual problem. I thought I was “coping” pretty well, overall.
And then, with my mother’s passing two months ago, it all came flooding back. Mom and I had a pretty miserable, controlling relationship. A combination of heavy guilt and genuine concern kept me from ever really making a clean break from her. I’d wondered vaguely, over the years, what might be loosed in me if I ever managed to really get away, or if perhaps some things would only be freed with her passing. When that finally happened, the very last thing I would have expected to immediately resurface, in this period of unusually volatile and open emotions, was all the bad old issues with gender. Popping up again with the force of a Mack truck on an icy downhill road.
A few of you know at least a little about where I’m coming from with this. You’ve put up with my little... idiosyncrasies... over the years. I haven’t actually asked for very much, though I’m sure it has sometimes felt like a lot because it all seems so counterintuitive. I’ve asked you to please not call me “miss” or “madame", even in jest. To try not to include me in any assumptions or arrangements you make about what “the ladies” might think or prefer. I’ve never asked for an alternate pronoun, because pronouns are ~such~ a hassle, it feels ridiculous to even ask. And I don’t usually try very hard to penetrate (if you’ll excuse the pun) the private community of the gentlemen. Experience has shown that while I’m generally more comfortable in male-oriented spaces, it can be painfully obvious when others are not quite so comfortable having me there.
I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody that a few years back, in the midst of another moment of unusually volatile and very open emotions, I started researching the process of sex reassignment. Out of the blue. I have never been able to remember what it was that prompted my sudden curiosity on this subject. What intrigued me most, at the time, was the realization that, in thinking about that whole process, there wasn’t any aspect of myself that I was attached to that would be threatened by such changes... nothing of what I felt to be ME that would be lost in that translation. I can’t tell you how serious this research was, or whether I ever intend to put that information to use, because I don’t know the answer. I can only tell you that I really wanted to know.
The word that I have generally preferred to use, up to now, is “Genderqueer”. I still like that word. It’s a great word. It says so many things - not only that I reserve the right to exist outside of anybody’s neat little standardized checkboxes, but also that I reject the whole system of thought which would require me, and everyone else, to just check one box and stay there.
Because I’m not really sure, at this point, that I’d want to “normalize” my identity to the extent that official gender-reassignment would achieve. My life experience has not been “normal”. My attitudes about gender aren’t “normal”. My personality certainly isn’t terribly “normal”. And I still consider myself gay, which would be terribly confusing if I were to legally transition from female to male. All those things are part of me. I’ve spent most of my life on the edges of things, and in some ways I really like living at the edges. It’s where I fit.
My body language, my mannerisms, are a mixed bag; some suggest male and some suggest female and some could go either way. It’s an occupational hazard of living as I’ve lived - neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, as the saying goes. I don’t know that I want to retrain all of that to be able to “pass”, to fit gender stereotypes that I don’t ascribe to anyway.
And when I’m not particularly feeling my physicality - when I am being a mind that is only incidentally housed in a body - I don’t tend to think of myself as having a gender at all. It’s not something that forms an integral part of my conscious personal identity. Intellectually, neither A nor B is very real to me. And so I can play with it. That’s one of the accommodations that I’ve come to, over the years; when I’m in the right kind of playful mood, and feeling more or less safe - or determined to consider myself as safe because I’m tired of feeling otherwise - gender expression can become a game. And let me tell you... gender is a really fun game. It’s like Halloween, getting to try on different personas, play a character. And it can be really interesting to see what people notice, and how they interpret it.
My normal presentation, in terms of clothing and outward appearances, is pretty nondescript, hovering around what might be termed androgynous. When I’m being more butch, it goes unnoticed, or at least uncommented upon. When I’m playing femme, it’s immediately noticed and always commented upon, usually in positive and highly complimentary ways. That’s both a lot of fun, and very frustrating, because the nature of the compliment always seems to assume that I am somehow letting loose my true self. I know it’s confusing, but that’s not the case. What I’m doing is playing a game, and incidentally having a grand old time with it. I don’t take appearances very seriously (as you may have noticed from the various interesting hair colors over the years), and I like to play with them. If I’d actually been born male, I’m pretty sure I’d be a drag queen. Some of us are just eccentric, right? I like to play. Play is a very human, very beautiful, very necessary thing. Gender expression is something I’ve learned to play with.
My more instinctive, gut-level, social identity is another story. When I am being sensitive to myself as a physical and social animal, in a culture that has a thousand little “unobtrusive” signs and markers of gender, I feel instantly and intensely that I am being cast in the wrong role. I perceive myself as male, and being treated as female is uncomfortable and embarrassing. It just feels ~wrong~.
When I dream of dancing, I’m Fred Astaire, not Ginger Rogers.
Yet after all this time I still find myself twitching, not wanting to look straight at it... whatever “it” is. Half a dozen times in the last month, in trying to explain this to someone, I have heard myself use the euphemism that, given a choice, I’d much rather have “played for the other team”. Aside from the highly appropriate use of sports metaphor as a culturally masculine trait, I find it disturbing that I have such trouble saying it square on.
And it’s been quite an experience, trying to reinhabit my body after so many years of choosing not to have one. Owning it and having to understand that yeah, I still hate it. It still feels alien, the product of some weird extraterrestrial sex-change virus, or maybe mind-transfer. There are parts of it that I don’t particularly want to touch, that I wish would go away. I try to ignore them in the shower. They don’t feel like ME. I can handle the genitalia (if you’ll excuse the slightly risque pun). Switching that would be a complicated problem with as many practical aspects as emotional ones. I would very much like for certain secondary sex characteristics to just... disappear. I suppose I could pray for breast cancer. Gods know I’ve been praying for menopause since age thirteen.
And, as Shakespeare once said, aye, there’s the rub. Because despite having somehow managed to convince myself that this isn’t really a big deal for me... it is. It is, and it was, and it will continue to be. And I don’t have a good answer for it right now. I suspect there’s a lot of processing ahead. I don’t know where it leads.
Part of me would really like to go find one of those little enclaves of queer artists and thinkers where everyone is into challenging assumptions about sex and gender and bodies and feelings and identities, and live there. Maybe someday I will. And then maybe this treacherous girl-body-thing that I live in won’t bother me so much. But at the moment, I live here. And so do lots of other people who might be feeling something like what I do, caught in awkward or frightened silences. We live here, and so we have to find ways to cope with here.
One of my future ways of coping is going to be owning the word “Transgender”. It’s a scary word - and when push really comes to shove, I like scary words. “Genderqueer” is ironically a more comfortable term precisely because it is more esoteric; it transmits less immediate meaning. “Transgender” is visceral and dangerous. It’s that syllable “trans" - as in “TRANSsexual" and “TRANSvestite". (To those of you who just mentally added “from TRANSylvania” - I love you people.)
That syllable is fraught with transgressive (TRANS-gressive) meaning. It intimates the crossing of boundaries that many hold sacred and inviolate. It hits us before we can get our shields up, reaches out and quickly, precisely, touches the places where we, as a society, automatically flinch and avert our eyes. And BECAUSE of that, it is important to use that word, hear that word, talk about that word and what it means to those of us who find that it describes something deeply real and highly significant about our lives, our minds, our bodies, our feelings and identities.
And so I ask of you now what I have not asked before. Bear with me while I try to define my identity among you in new ways. I may gradually make some shifts in my everyday gender presentation (though I warn you, I will still be playful sometimes, just to confuse you). I may even ask you for a change of pronouns. And I invite you to talk about it, to ask questions.
What I would like is for all of us - myself included - to begin NOT averting our eyes... even if we do still flinch. To start asking more questions and questioning more assumptions. To be more willing to risk discomfort and embarrassment by bringing up the taboo subject, to make it something we DO talk about. Who are you? What is your sense of who you are, versus other people’s? Are you comfortable in your skin? Are you comfortable in your world? Because I know there are others out there, maybe even others in here, who are perhaps even more silent than I have been.
What would happen if we learned, not merely to be accepting of diversity, but to get genuinely excited about it? How much richer might it make us if we really take the trouble to engage with it, to willingly take a stab at seeing our world through someone else’s eyes... and then someone else’s, and someone else again...? How much bigger would our world become, how much within it would be new and strange and colorful and inspiring, if instead of saying, “All are welcome here, it doesn’t matter who you are”, we were to begin saying, “YOU are welcome here, and we care deeply about who you are, and we want to know more about you”?
Break through the walls of words. Send up the fireworks in colors no mere earthly rainbow ever imagined. This is my heartfelt dream for us, as a community. This is my hopeful request to you, as MY community.
On March 2nd, 2014, I stood up in front of my entire UU congregation and outed myself as being Trans, via the following reflection. Rereading it has made me cry.
I've come quite a distance since that moment. At that time, it was all very raw, very full of questions without answers. But being willing to start from there, openly - from a place of no assumptions or expectations - is what has made me able to move forward as honestly as I have. Looking back, I can see how far I've come in such a short time, toward knowing myself.
So today, again, I share this with you. I've changed only one thing, the name - I used my "mundane" name on that day. I'm still choosing for now to not include that information in this blog, though I suspect I eventually will.
Some of you were there. Some of you are "hearing" this for the first time. All of you are precious to me. Happy New Year, everyone. Remember that life always has surprises in store, and that the hardest ones to embrace are the ones that hold the truest transformative power. May all of your life-transitions be as fruitful as this one has been, and continues to be, for me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi, I’m Phoenix. You all know me. I’ve been here a while. I’ve shown you a lot about who I am. But not all of it. I’m musical, I’m intellectual, I’m a terrible ham. I’m openly gay, at least around here.
I am also Transgender, and that’s a subject I’ve kept mostly to myself.
You see me as female. I don’t see myself that way. I’ve known this since I was a teenager. I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to hide it... but I don’t exactly talk much about it either. And until recently, I hadn’t really thought very much about how that’s been affecting me. And in a way, affecting my community as well. Because I haven’t given you the chance to see me for who I really am, even if to do so might require a little stretching.
It’s too easy to step back from your own reality because you just get tired of dealing with it. The confused and skeptical looks. The way that everyday language suddenly becomes awkward. The way that friends become uncomfortable, hesitant about how to act around you. So most of the time I don’t correct the assumptions that people make. I don’t want to cause embarrassment - yours or mine. I don’t want to be someone who is unpleasant to be around because my very presence makes unusual social demands... because SO much of what we act out as gender roles in our society happens “under the radar”- things that we do or say automatically, without even realizing it. “Ladies first,” right? “Let me get that for you.” Oh, God.
It’s an interesting experience, trying to drive in the wrong lane, as if my life were a British car. Puberty is especially fun when your brain and Mother Nature disagree on what gender you are. It feels like living in a sci-fi movie where the aliens have taken control of your body... you see what’s happening but you can’t stop it. You’re experiencing a horror flick from the ~inside~ , wishing desperately that there was some way to just get up and walk out of the theater.
My way of “walking out" was pretty direct: as far as my physicality was concerned, I just ... shut down. Body? What body? In another exciting sci-fi plot twist, I became an entity without a physical being, just a mind somehow connected with a ghostly pair of hands that could manipulate the world, nothing really real below the neck. I’m fairly certain that my serious ongoing health problems today are in large part the result of approximately thirty years of pretending that I don’t have a body. Abusing my health? Eh. Physical pain? No big deal. Short of breath? Listen, breathing is highly overrated.
Clamp down on your physicality and you clamp down on your feelings, too. I have struggled since high school with depression - not just “the blues” where life feels vaguely unsatisfying for unknown reasons, but real deep-down depression characterized by a sort of rampant apathy, in which all the places where you used to be able to find joy in your soul are somehow locked up, inaccessible. In fact, all emotions are mere shadows of what they once were, the ghosts of pain and pleasure. It’s a fine solution. I could highly recommend depression as a simple fix for all life’s problems, except of course for these few unpleasant side effects.
Certainly, other factors contributed there as well. Sometimes I think my family had enough psychological “stuff" for any six families. In fact, there were enough other factors that I could easily make myself forget that gender was one of them. And in my adult life I gradually came to a series of compromises with gender, sometimes ignoring its existence, sometimes playing it like a game. It became an intellectual problem. I thought I was “coping” pretty well, overall.
And then, with my mother’s passing two months ago, it all came flooding back. Mom and I had a pretty miserable, controlling relationship. A combination of heavy guilt and genuine concern kept me from ever really making a clean break from her. I’d wondered vaguely, over the years, what might be loosed in me if I ever managed to really get away, or if perhaps some things would only be freed with her passing. When that finally happened, the very last thing I would have expected to immediately resurface, in this period of unusually volatile and open emotions, was all the bad old issues with gender. Popping up again with the force of a Mack truck on an icy downhill road.
A few of you know at least a little about where I’m coming from with this. You’ve put up with my little... idiosyncrasies... over the years. I haven’t actually asked for very much, though I’m sure it has sometimes felt like a lot because it all seems so counterintuitive. I’ve asked you to please not call me “miss” or “madame", even in jest. To try not to include me in any assumptions or arrangements you make about what “the ladies” might think or prefer. I’ve never asked for an alternate pronoun, because pronouns are ~such~ a hassle, it feels ridiculous to even ask. And I don’t usually try very hard to penetrate (if you’ll excuse the pun) the private community of the gentlemen. Experience has shown that while I’m generally more comfortable in male-oriented spaces, it can be painfully obvious when others are not quite so comfortable having me there.
I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody that a few years back, in the midst of another moment of unusually volatile and very open emotions, I started researching the process of sex reassignment. Out of the blue. I have never been able to remember what it was that prompted my sudden curiosity on this subject. What intrigued me most, at the time, was the realization that, in thinking about that whole process, there wasn’t any aspect of myself that I was attached to that would be threatened by such changes... nothing of what I felt to be ME that would be lost in that translation. I can’t tell you how serious this research was, or whether I ever intend to put that information to use, because I don’t know the answer. I can only tell you that I really wanted to know.
The word that I have generally preferred to use, up to now, is “Genderqueer”. I still like that word. It’s a great word. It says so many things - not only that I reserve the right to exist outside of anybody’s neat little standardized checkboxes, but also that I reject the whole system of thought which would require me, and everyone else, to just check one box and stay there.
Because I’m not really sure, at this point, that I’d want to “normalize” my identity to the extent that official gender-reassignment would achieve. My life experience has not been “normal”. My attitudes about gender aren’t “normal”. My personality certainly isn’t terribly “normal”. And I still consider myself gay, which would be terribly confusing if I were to legally transition from female to male. All those things are part of me. I’ve spent most of my life on the edges of things, and in some ways I really like living at the edges. It’s where I fit.
My body language, my mannerisms, are a mixed bag; some suggest male and some suggest female and some could go either way. It’s an occupational hazard of living as I’ve lived - neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, as the saying goes. I don’t know that I want to retrain all of that to be able to “pass”, to fit gender stereotypes that I don’t ascribe to anyway.
And when I’m not particularly feeling my physicality - when I am being a mind that is only incidentally housed in a body - I don’t tend to think of myself as having a gender at all. It’s not something that forms an integral part of my conscious personal identity. Intellectually, neither A nor B is very real to me. And so I can play with it. That’s one of the accommodations that I’ve come to, over the years; when I’m in the right kind of playful mood, and feeling more or less safe - or determined to consider myself as safe because I’m tired of feeling otherwise - gender expression can become a game. And let me tell you... gender is a really fun game. It’s like Halloween, getting to try on different personas, play a character. And it can be really interesting to see what people notice, and how they interpret it.
My normal presentation, in terms of clothing and outward appearances, is pretty nondescript, hovering around what might be termed androgynous. When I’m being more butch, it goes unnoticed, or at least uncommented upon. When I’m playing femme, it’s immediately noticed and always commented upon, usually in positive and highly complimentary ways. That’s both a lot of fun, and very frustrating, because the nature of the compliment always seems to assume that I am somehow letting loose my true self. I know it’s confusing, but that’s not the case. What I’m doing is playing a game, and incidentally having a grand old time with it. I don’t take appearances very seriously (as you may have noticed from the various interesting hair colors over the years), and I like to play with them. If I’d actually been born male, I’m pretty sure I’d be a drag queen. Some of us are just eccentric, right? I like to play. Play is a very human, very beautiful, very necessary thing. Gender expression is something I’ve learned to play with.
My more instinctive, gut-level, social identity is another story. When I am being sensitive to myself as a physical and social animal, in a culture that has a thousand little “unobtrusive” signs and markers of gender, I feel instantly and intensely that I am being cast in the wrong role. I perceive myself as male, and being treated as female is uncomfortable and embarrassing. It just feels ~wrong~.
When I dream of dancing, I’m Fred Astaire, not Ginger Rogers.
Yet after all this time I still find myself twitching, not wanting to look straight at it... whatever “it” is. Half a dozen times in the last month, in trying to explain this to someone, I have heard myself use the euphemism that, given a choice, I’d much rather have “played for the other team”. Aside from the highly appropriate use of sports metaphor as a culturally masculine trait, I find it disturbing that I have such trouble saying it square on.
And it’s been quite an experience, trying to reinhabit my body after so many years of choosing not to have one. Owning it and having to understand that yeah, I still hate it. It still feels alien, the product of some weird extraterrestrial sex-change virus, or maybe mind-transfer. There are parts of it that I don’t particularly want to touch, that I wish would go away. I try to ignore them in the shower. They don’t feel like ME. I can handle the genitalia (if you’ll excuse the slightly risque pun). Switching that would be a complicated problem with as many practical aspects as emotional ones. I would very much like for certain secondary sex characteristics to just... disappear. I suppose I could pray for breast cancer. Gods know I’ve been praying for menopause since age thirteen.
And, as Shakespeare once said, aye, there’s the rub. Because despite having somehow managed to convince myself that this isn’t really a big deal for me... it is. It is, and it was, and it will continue to be. And I don’t have a good answer for it right now. I suspect there’s a lot of processing ahead. I don’t know where it leads.
Part of me would really like to go find one of those little enclaves of queer artists and thinkers where everyone is into challenging assumptions about sex and gender and bodies and feelings and identities, and live there. Maybe someday I will. And then maybe this treacherous girl-body-thing that I live in won’t bother me so much. But at the moment, I live here. And so do lots of other people who might be feeling something like what I do, caught in awkward or frightened silences. We live here, and so we have to find ways to cope with here.
One of my future ways of coping is going to be owning the word “Transgender”. It’s a scary word - and when push really comes to shove, I like scary words. “Genderqueer” is ironically a more comfortable term precisely because it is more esoteric; it transmits less immediate meaning. “Transgender” is visceral and dangerous. It’s that syllable “trans" - as in “TRANSsexual" and “TRANSvestite". (To those of you who just mentally added “from TRANSylvania” - I love you people.)
That syllable is fraught with transgressive (TRANS-gressive) meaning. It intimates the crossing of boundaries that many hold sacred and inviolate. It hits us before we can get our shields up, reaches out and quickly, precisely, touches the places where we, as a society, automatically flinch and avert our eyes. And BECAUSE of that, it is important to use that word, hear that word, talk about that word and what it means to those of us who find that it describes something deeply real and highly significant about our lives, our minds, our bodies, our feelings and identities.
And so I ask of you now what I have not asked before. Bear with me while I try to define my identity among you in new ways. I may gradually make some shifts in my everyday gender presentation (though I warn you, I will still be playful sometimes, just to confuse you). I may even ask you for a change of pronouns. And I invite you to talk about it, to ask questions.
What I would like is for all of us - myself included - to begin NOT averting our eyes... even if we do still flinch. To start asking more questions and questioning more assumptions. To be more willing to risk discomfort and embarrassment by bringing up the taboo subject, to make it something we DO talk about. Who are you? What is your sense of who you are, versus other people’s? Are you comfortable in your skin? Are you comfortable in your world? Because I know there are others out there, maybe even others in here, who are perhaps even more silent than I have been.
What would happen if we learned, not merely to be accepting of diversity, but to get genuinely excited about it? How much richer might it make us if we really take the trouble to engage with it, to willingly take a stab at seeing our world through someone else’s eyes... and then someone else’s, and someone else again...? How much bigger would our world become, how much within it would be new and strange and colorful and inspiring, if instead of saying, “All are welcome here, it doesn’t matter who you are”, we were to begin saying, “YOU are welcome here, and we care deeply about who you are, and we want to know more about you”?
Break through the walls of words. Send up the fireworks in colors no mere earthly rainbow ever imagined. This is my heartfelt dream for us, as a community. This is my hopeful request to you, as MY community.
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