Normal - An Interlude
So, while still pondering the many faces of “normal” this past weekend, I was graciously offered some field experience by the Universe: a chance to go hang out for a few hours with a broad cross-section of other NH transfolk - young and old, tall and short, fat and thin, pre-transition and post-transition and in-transition and non-transitioning, along with those who identify as genderqueer, gender-fluid, or gender-nonconforming... and, of course, Allies. This cool little get-together was a “wellness event” run by an organzation called Transgender New Hampshire (TGNH) and held at a local UU church. It was attended by around 70 people, more than enough to make the downstairs Fellowship Hall feel nice and full.
Let me tell you, “normal” was strained to the hilt in that room - to which I can only say, WAY COOL!!!
It was an all-day event of which I missed the first half, alas, due to my work schedule. (Not too much “alas,” as I was working with my very fun little group of madrigal singers that morning. But hey, you guys - and gals - could the next one not be on a Saturday? Or, um, a Sunday... or, um... hmmm... well, we’ll get back to that!) I was impressed by the quality of the workshops I was able to attend, on the topics of body image versus cultural expectations and creative self-expression through writing. I was unfortunately too tired to really socialize (and I’m not much of a social butterfly, or even a moth, even at the best of times) but I’m glad I made this preliminary connection with the group, and hope to become more involved with it as time goes on.
What struck me most about this experience, though, was the way in which my own perceptions shifted during the few hours that I was part of that group. It was a lesson for me - or rather, a reminder - on the subject of philosophy versus “gut reaction.” And at first it was a rather unpleasant one, because I was not pleased with my reactions!
You see, when I first entered, I found that I was extremely aware - hyper-aware, really - of every nonconforming element in the crowd: faces, voices, bodies, movements, clothing. Not that I wanted or wished for anyone there (myself included!) to conform... but while the higher parts of my brain understood that perfectly well, the more primal parts were saying, Whoa, watch out - this is unfamiliar territory! My awareness was on high alert because the appearance of my world had suddenly changed. Not in ways that were unexpected or disliked, but simply in ways that I don’t see very often - because, of course, the vast majority of the people I see around me, in my everyday life, are gender-conforming. I may not be “normal" myself, but I walk in a world of “normal” - as do most of us.
At first I found this experience ironic to a high degree, and even disturbing. How is it that, surrounded by people who are more like me (at least in this one very significant way) than most of those with whom I daily interact, I would feel less comfortable, more guarded?
And then I remembered: yeah, I’ve had lessons like this before. Lessons on the subject of the Familiar versus the Unfamiliar, and moments of clear insight about what the brain does with them.
Let me tell you about one of those moments.
A lifetime or two ago, when I was a music student at UNH (my first, and interrupted, run at college), I played trumpet in the UNH Wind Symphony, a large classical ensemble formed of brasses, woodwinds, and percussion. And one semester we played a piece of music that I hated. Absolutely hated.
It was an early work by Schoenberg, famed for his atonal, avant-garde-sounding compositions, in particular a series of explorations into what he called the twelve-tone system, in which there is no root tone (i.e, the “do” of “Doe, A Deer”) and no defining key structure. Of course, this particular piece (the director assured us), being an early example of his work, was in fact very tonal (based in standard scales) and delightfully melodic. I didn’t believe it. To me it was the most god-awful, cacophonous, tangled mess of notes I’d ever had the misfortune to be required to listen to - much less play. I detested it both in practice and in principle.
Now, please understand, I wasn’t a kid who’d been raised on pop songs and was only now being exposed to complex, high-level music. No, I was (much to the distress of my classical-music-hating mother) a lover of Mozart and Bach, and a serious fan of the King’s Singers and the Canadian Brass Quintet. I learned madrigals (with their highly complicated vocal harmonies) just for the heck of it, even though I had no one to sing them with. I had my own copies of several books of the Norton Scores (condensed director’s versions of famous symphonic works) and would happily “conduct” my way through a recording of Beethoven's Eroica or Mozart's 40th (yes, I even owned a baton) as something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon. (Look, we’ve already established that I was a weird kid, okay? So just shush already!)
But this silly Schoenberg thing... it sounded like a collection of random notes, chosen by chimpanzees exploring a piano. To my ear, there was just plain no pattern to it, no shape, no development or progression of theme. And - arrogant just-beyond-teenager that I was - I was sure that it therefore had no musical value whatsoever, and that all of the experts who revered it were a load of looneys. It was (I argued) like abstract art: you could see anything in it that you wanted to see... a sort of BYOI (Bring Your Own Interpretation) scenario - with the painter probably snickering behind the door as he watches you try to wrest some sort of objective meaning from his “masterpiece" of random lines and splotches. Ha!
And so for an entire semester, four long months, we practiced the damn thing. And practiced. And practiced. Ugh! Until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Until I was about ready to quit the ensemble. Until about a week before the concert date (after which we would, thank god, ~never~ have to play it again)... when I suddenly started hearing patterns in it.
I was stunned. Where the hell did those come from? Had we been playing it that badly, up until just now? No, for this was a fairly high-level ensemble. But here, out of the blue, were recognizable shapes in it, bandied about from one instrument to the next, echoes of an actual theme that I felt I might even catch more of, if we had more time...
And so, with my mouth full of crow (which is pretty hard to digest, at any age), I had to admit that I’d been incapable of hearing the patterns, the heart of the music, at first, because its shape was simply too unfamiliar. Before my brain could begin to pull out themes and symmetries, it had to assimilate the basic framework of the piece, which was unlike anything I’d previously played or listened to. It had to get familiar enough to feel... “normal”... and THEN I could hear its more subtle aspects, and value it for what it was.
To use a simile that may help: Imagine someone who has never even ridden in a car before - say, someone from a country where autos and paved roads are rare - plunked into the driver’s seat of a modern automobile and expected to operate it. Someone who already has a basic familiarity with car dashboards and the kinds of controls and information that they contain - speed, mileage, test lights, turn signals, engine warnings, etc. - can easily comprehend any configuration of these elements, and anyone who has grown up in a driving culture has at least that basic familiarity. But if you didn’t have that... well, imagine that instead of a car dashboard, it’s a plane’s cockpit that you’re staring down at, and you’re not a pilot. The setup of the controls is completely logical and practical - and completely incomprehensible. It’s just too much information to assimilate all at once, when you lack that familiar mental framework.
Or, here’s an even better example... and if you’ve ever learned a language that uses a different set of written symbols than your native language’s alphabet, you’ll probably know just where I’m going with this one. When I first started studying Greek, I discovered, to my surprise and dismay, that it was terribly, terribly hard to use the dictionary! I had no problem reading, spelling, or writing individual Greek words and sentences. (In fact I was rather proud of my penmanship in those lovely strange letters!) But opening my big Greek lexicon and trying to track down one word among six thousand similar-looking words on the page - my brain simply balked. Although I could easily name any individual letter on the page, the page as a whole somehow just looked like... nonsense. Like meaningless scribbles. Like scattered bits of curly pasta. It was almost like what some people describe as “word-blindness," which can happen in a situation of shock or injury: I could see the page just fine, but could not comprehend it.
Whereas a dictionary page in English, or at least in the English (Latinate) alphabet, doesn’t do that to me, no matter how complex or foreign the words, because their visual framework is FAMILIAR. The background of the language - not just the words, but even just the letter-shapes and syllables - form patterns that my brain is USED to.
In other words: One of the biggest contributors to “normal” is “familiar.” “Normal” is The Known.
I suspect that the brain is built to work this way. Familiar means safe, and until we feel safe, we're programmed to be hyper-sensitive to anything that's out of the norm. We may know intellectually that there's no danger... but we still possess a hindbrain that reserves the right to its own opinions.
And so, similarly, in the case of this past weekend. My brain - ALL of our brains - well, they're USED to the kinds of patterns that we see daily in the culture around us. For instance, in modern Western society, the women (or at least those people who look like women) may wear skirts, but the guys (or at least those people who look like guys) emphatically do not (unless of course you’re at a Ren Faire). Anything that departs from that pattern is jarring, at least temporarily. And when it’s the pattern itself that seems to have changed - when the room (or the world) seems suddenly FULL of people who are breaking, or even inverting, those patterns... well, that can make a brain just a wee bit unsettled ("Danger, Will Robinson!") - even if its owner heartily approves!
In my last entry, I closed with a reflection about what an important part I think transfolk can play in helping to remold our culture’s impressions of “normal” - and how important it is that we do so. This recent experience has intensified that feeling for me, and made me want to explore it further.
You see, my discomfort lasted only a very short time - but while it lasted, it felt very strange. It was like being dropped onto another planet - Planet Trans. (Okay, sing it with me now, Rocky Horror fans: “I’m just a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania...” ... er, sorry, got carried away there for a moment! :D ) Or, for all you Heinlein readers out there - I felt very much like “The Man From Mars”: raised by aliens and then dumped back on Earth among his fellow humans. Yes, I know that these are my people... but they’re not the people I’m USED to! You grok??
I got beyond this state pretty quickly, of course. But then, I am personally invested in the positive valuation of diversity and the breaking of barriers, and have been since long before I came out as Trans. I believe deeply in freedom of self-expression, including gender expression, and in the rights of transfolk to be who they (we) are. And I identify as part of this community, even though I’m just now exploring its local manifestation.
But imagine what that room might have felt like to someone who comes from a very different background, lives in a very different kind of world. Someone who is deeply invested in NORMAL.
What’s the solution to this? I think it’s twofold. First and foremost, of course, comes education. But when we have exhausted the efforts of education, what it really comes down to is, what is the image of “normal” that we go through life seeing, owning, internalizing?
A couple of days ago, while working on this entry, I heard a speaker on the local NPR station suggest that one likely reason why gay rights are becoming more and more accepted in an ever-growing proportion of the population, while abortion is still a highly contested subject, is that nearly everyone these days personally knows someone who has come out as gay, while those who have an abortion don’t talk about it. (The argument that abortion is a moral issue doesn’t really account for the difference, because homosexuality was also widely considered a moral issue!) But while abortion is still mostly a secretive thing, over the last decade, gay people have become not only more vocal about their rights, but also more present in the world, more visible in everyday situations... more willing to be “out” and identifiable.
Of course, there are differences between being out as Gay and being out as Trans; I won’t even try to figure out which is harder. (I have been out as both, but everyone’s life is different; the principle of YMMV -Your Mileage May Vary - definitely applies here!) It’s not an easy thing to do either way, and there are many reasons - including protection of one’s family and one’s livelihood - why not everyone can be as Out And Proud as they might wish to be.
But the more of us who can do so, the more our presence in the world will change “normal” - in ways that education, information, lobbying, and law will never do by themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, now: education and information help to make more people willing to be uncomfortable, to step outside of “normal” for the sake of equality and justice - and that is a VERY needful thing! But “normal” itself is only changed by actual experience, by getting the brain accustomed to new ways of being, new worlds of possibility - making them familiar through everyday experience in the world.
And this is one reason why organizations like TGNH are so important - not just for the great work they do on individual issues (such as the new NH DMV rules for change of gender - huzzah!), but also for JUST BEING THERE, making us more visible against the background of this gender-normative culture.
And so I invite all of you who are friends and Allies to help spread the word in some way, whether large or small. Share this blog, or the TGNH website or Facebook page. Get educated about us (I’m always willing to be a resource - PLEASE use me - wait, that didn’t come out quite right...) so that, if the topic comes up, you can enter the conversation as an informed advocate. Maybe even consider coming to an event as an Ally. (This one featured a two-part workshop specifically for Allies.) Help us become a bigger, more visible presence in the everyday world of real people, not just the abstract world of the law and its precepts.
Because simple presence is the only thing that can actually revise “normal.” Just being there, and being who we are. And what an amazing superpower that is, when you think about it!
Hey, boys and girls (and everyone in between), did you know that I can change the world just by being ME?? :)
Let me tell you, “normal” was strained to the hilt in that room - to which I can only say, WAY COOL!!!
It was an all-day event of which I missed the first half, alas, due to my work schedule. (Not too much “alas,” as I was working with my very fun little group of madrigal singers that morning. But hey, you guys - and gals - could the next one not be on a Saturday? Or, um, a Sunday... or, um... hmmm... well, we’ll get back to that!) I was impressed by the quality of the workshops I was able to attend, on the topics of body image versus cultural expectations and creative self-expression through writing. I was unfortunately too tired to really socialize (and I’m not much of a social butterfly, or even a moth, even at the best of times) but I’m glad I made this preliminary connection with the group, and hope to become more involved with it as time goes on.
What struck me most about this experience, though, was the way in which my own perceptions shifted during the few hours that I was part of that group. It was a lesson for me - or rather, a reminder - on the subject of philosophy versus “gut reaction.” And at first it was a rather unpleasant one, because I was not pleased with my reactions!
You see, when I first entered, I found that I was extremely aware - hyper-aware, really - of every nonconforming element in the crowd: faces, voices, bodies, movements, clothing. Not that I wanted or wished for anyone there (myself included!) to conform... but while the higher parts of my brain understood that perfectly well, the more primal parts were saying, Whoa, watch out - this is unfamiliar territory! My awareness was on high alert because the appearance of my world had suddenly changed. Not in ways that were unexpected or disliked, but simply in ways that I don’t see very often - because, of course, the vast majority of the people I see around me, in my everyday life, are gender-conforming. I may not be “normal" myself, but I walk in a world of “normal” - as do most of us.
At first I found this experience ironic to a high degree, and even disturbing. How is it that, surrounded by people who are more like me (at least in this one very significant way) than most of those with whom I daily interact, I would feel less comfortable, more guarded?
And then I remembered: yeah, I’ve had lessons like this before. Lessons on the subject of the Familiar versus the Unfamiliar, and moments of clear insight about what the brain does with them.
Let me tell you about one of those moments.
A lifetime or two ago, when I was a music student at UNH (my first, and interrupted, run at college), I played trumpet in the UNH Wind Symphony, a large classical ensemble formed of brasses, woodwinds, and percussion. And one semester we played a piece of music that I hated. Absolutely hated.
It was an early work by Schoenberg, famed for his atonal, avant-garde-sounding compositions, in particular a series of explorations into what he called the twelve-tone system, in which there is no root tone (i.e, the “do” of “Doe, A Deer”) and no defining key structure. Of course, this particular piece (the director assured us), being an early example of his work, was in fact very tonal (based in standard scales) and delightfully melodic. I didn’t believe it. To me it was the most god-awful, cacophonous, tangled mess of notes I’d ever had the misfortune to be required to listen to - much less play. I detested it both in practice and in principle.
Now, please understand, I wasn’t a kid who’d been raised on pop songs and was only now being exposed to complex, high-level music. No, I was (much to the distress of my classical-music-hating mother) a lover of Mozart and Bach, and a serious fan of the King’s Singers and the Canadian Brass Quintet. I learned madrigals (with their highly complicated vocal harmonies) just for the heck of it, even though I had no one to sing them with. I had my own copies of several books of the Norton Scores (condensed director’s versions of famous symphonic works) and would happily “conduct” my way through a recording of Beethoven's Eroica or Mozart's 40th (yes, I even owned a baton) as something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon. (Look, we’ve already established that I was a weird kid, okay? So just shush already!)
But this silly Schoenberg thing... it sounded like a collection of random notes, chosen by chimpanzees exploring a piano. To my ear, there was just plain no pattern to it, no shape, no development or progression of theme. And - arrogant just-beyond-teenager that I was - I was sure that it therefore had no musical value whatsoever, and that all of the experts who revered it were a load of looneys. It was (I argued) like abstract art: you could see anything in it that you wanted to see... a sort of BYOI (Bring Your Own Interpretation) scenario - with the painter probably snickering behind the door as he watches you try to wrest some sort of objective meaning from his “masterpiece" of random lines and splotches. Ha!
And so for an entire semester, four long months, we practiced the damn thing. And practiced. And practiced. Ugh! Until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Until I was about ready to quit the ensemble. Until about a week before the concert date (after which we would, thank god, ~never~ have to play it again)... when I suddenly started hearing patterns in it.
I was stunned. Where the hell did those come from? Had we been playing it that badly, up until just now? No, for this was a fairly high-level ensemble. But here, out of the blue, were recognizable shapes in it, bandied about from one instrument to the next, echoes of an actual theme that I felt I might even catch more of, if we had more time...
And so, with my mouth full of crow (which is pretty hard to digest, at any age), I had to admit that I’d been incapable of hearing the patterns, the heart of the music, at first, because its shape was simply too unfamiliar. Before my brain could begin to pull out themes and symmetries, it had to assimilate the basic framework of the piece, which was unlike anything I’d previously played or listened to. It had to get familiar enough to feel... “normal”... and THEN I could hear its more subtle aspects, and value it for what it was.
To use a simile that may help: Imagine someone who has never even ridden in a car before - say, someone from a country where autos and paved roads are rare - plunked into the driver’s seat of a modern automobile and expected to operate it. Someone who already has a basic familiarity with car dashboards and the kinds of controls and information that they contain - speed, mileage, test lights, turn signals, engine warnings, etc. - can easily comprehend any configuration of these elements, and anyone who has grown up in a driving culture has at least that basic familiarity. But if you didn’t have that... well, imagine that instead of a car dashboard, it’s a plane’s cockpit that you’re staring down at, and you’re not a pilot. The setup of the controls is completely logical and practical - and completely incomprehensible. It’s just too much information to assimilate all at once, when you lack that familiar mental framework.
Or, here’s an even better example... and if you’ve ever learned a language that uses a different set of written symbols than your native language’s alphabet, you’ll probably know just where I’m going with this one. When I first started studying Greek, I discovered, to my surprise and dismay, that it was terribly, terribly hard to use the dictionary! I had no problem reading, spelling, or writing individual Greek words and sentences. (In fact I was rather proud of my penmanship in those lovely strange letters!) But opening my big Greek lexicon and trying to track down one word among six thousand similar-looking words on the page - my brain simply balked. Although I could easily name any individual letter on the page, the page as a whole somehow just looked like... nonsense. Like meaningless scribbles. Like scattered bits of curly pasta. It was almost like what some people describe as “word-blindness," which can happen in a situation of shock or injury: I could see the page just fine, but could not comprehend it.
Whereas a dictionary page in English, or at least in the English (Latinate) alphabet, doesn’t do that to me, no matter how complex or foreign the words, because their visual framework is FAMILIAR. The background of the language - not just the words, but even just the letter-shapes and syllables - form patterns that my brain is USED to.
In other words: One of the biggest contributors to “normal” is “familiar.” “Normal” is The Known.
I suspect that the brain is built to work this way. Familiar means safe, and until we feel safe, we're programmed to be hyper-sensitive to anything that's out of the norm. We may know intellectually that there's no danger... but we still possess a hindbrain that reserves the right to its own opinions.
And so, similarly, in the case of this past weekend. My brain - ALL of our brains - well, they're USED to the kinds of patterns that we see daily in the culture around us. For instance, in modern Western society, the women (or at least those people who look like women) may wear skirts, but the guys (or at least those people who look like guys) emphatically do not (unless of course you’re at a Ren Faire). Anything that departs from that pattern is jarring, at least temporarily. And when it’s the pattern itself that seems to have changed - when the room (or the world) seems suddenly FULL of people who are breaking, or even inverting, those patterns... well, that can make a brain just a wee bit unsettled ("Danger, Will Robinson!") - even if its owner heartily approves!
In my last entry, I closed with a reflection about what an important part I think transfolk can play in helping to remold our culture’s impressions of “normal” - and how important it is that we do so. This recent experience has intensified that feeling for me, and made me want to explore it further.
You see, my discomfort lasted only a very short time - but while it lasted, it felt very strange. It was like being dropped onto another planet - Planet Trans. (Okay, sing it with me now, Rocky Horror fans: “I’m just a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania...” ... er, sorry, got carried away there for a moment! :D ) Or, for all you Heinlein readers out there - I felt very much like “The Man From Mars”: raised by aliens and then dumped back on Earth among his fellow humans. Yes, I know that these are my people... but they’re not the people I’m USED to! You grok??
I got beyond this state pretty quickly, of course. But then, I am personally invested in the positive valuation of diversity and the breaking of barriers, and have been since long before I came out as Trans. I believe deeply in freedom of self-expression, including gender expression, and in the rights of transfolk to be who they (we) are. And I identify as part of this community, even though I’m just now exploring its local manifestation.
But imagine what that room might have felt like to someone who comes from a very different background, lives in a very different kind of world. Someone who is deeply invested in NORMAL.
What’s the solution to this? I think it’s twofold. First and foremost, of course, comes education. But when we have exhausted the efforts of education, what it really comes down to is, what is the image of “normal” that we go through life seeing, owning, internalizing?
A couple of days ago, while working on this entry, I heard a speaker on the local NPR station suggest that one likely reason why gay rights are becoming more and more accepted in an ever-growing proportion of the population, while abortion is still a highly contested subject, is that nearly everyone these days personally knows someone who has come out as gay, while those who have an abortion don’t talk about it. (The argument that abortion is a moral issue doesn’t really account for the difference, because homosexuality was also widely considered a moral issue!) But while abortion is still mostly a secretive thing, over the last decade, gay people have become not only more vocal about their rights, but also more present in the world, more visible in everyday situations... more willing to be “out” and identifiable.
Of course, there are differences between being out as Gay and being out as Trans; I won’t even try to figure out which is harder. (I have been out as both, but everyone’s life is different; the principle of YMMV -Your Mileage May Vary - definitely applies here!) It’s not an easy thing to do either way, and there are many reasons - including protection of one’s family and one’s livelihood - why not everyone can be as Out And Proud as they might wish to be.
But the more of us who can do so, the more our presence in the world will change “normal” - in ways that education, information, lobbying, and law will never do by themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, now: education and information help to make more people willing to be uncomfortable, to step outside of “normal” for the sake of equality and justice - and that is a VERY needful thing! But “normal” itself is only changed by actual experience, by getting the brain accustomed to new ways of being, new worlds of possibility - making them familiar through everyday experience in the world.
And this is one reason why organizations like TGNH are so important - not just for the great work they do on individual issues (such as the new NH DMV rules for change of gender - huzzah!), but also for JUST BEING THERE, making us more visible against the background of this gender-normative culture.
And so I invite all of you who are friends and Allies to help spread the word in some way, whether large or small. Share this blog, or the TGNH website or Facebook page. Get educated about us (I’m always willing to be a resource - PLEASE use me - wait, that didn’t come out quite right...) so that, if the topic comes up, you can enter the conversation as an informed advocate. Maybe even consider coming to an event as an Ally. (This one featured a two-part workshop specifically for Allies.) Help us become a bigger, more visible presence in the everyday world of real people, not just the abstract world of the law and its precepts.
Because simple presence is the only thing that can actually revise “normal.” Just being there, and being who we are. And what an amazing superpower that is, when you think about it!
Hey, boys and girls (and everyone in between), did you know that I can change the world just by being ME?? :)
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