Over 50% of transgender children try to commit suicide by their mid to late teenage years. A large number of them succeed. And the main reason that these children state that they try to harm themselves is the lack of love and support of their family and friends. My wife and I decided that we would much rather have a happy, healthy daughter than a dead son.
All you have is your experience in this world. The good…the bad…the whole and broken…add to that the sorts of experiences that the quote speaks of.
I would add one thing: dysphoria is a real condition that exists, of utter dislocation that transcends understanding, acceptance, and action. It can be managed and worked around, even built into certain things? But it can never be thought away, prayed away, or believed away.
The brain and body of a person with gender dysphoria will never flow together They are oil and vinegar.
As such, they can be a fabulous and tasty dressing…but they will not find the congruence that is present with a cis-gendered person.
So all the crap and stuff that all humans endure? Differently abled people endure all that with additional conditions placed on their lives…dysphoria is one of them.
That doesn’t give me or any dysphoric person a pass…because each human has conditions on them that are invisible to everyone else.
So be tender hearted…understanding…full of forgiveness…and above all be kind.
Lives depend on it.
Of all the things I keep trying to tell cis people, “don’t presume your child’s gender” is the one that they consistently, deliberately refuse to understand and it is so deeply telling.
You cannot truly understand the transgender experience, and cannot count yourself an ally, until you accept that the trauma of being transgender is not inherent, it is a product of being coerced into thinking that you had absolutely no choice but to be the gender you were assigned.
Not “born with”, not “biologically”, the gender you were assigned.
The problem is assignment. The problem is doctors and parents believing it is their place to dictate their child’s gender, starting before they can even conceptualize what a gender is, let alone have the mental development necessary to object to what they’re given. This defines a child’s entire life, cuts short countless possibilities. It etches itself into the fabric of our developing minds and it is a ticking psychological time bomb for those children who are given a gender assignment that they cannot or do not wish to live with. This culture of dictated identity must end if transgender people are ever to be regarding as whole and equal members of society.
Constance, this is a pretty dang good analysis of the Jenner interview.
*I am calling this person Jenner for now…while Jenner has given request for male pronouns to be used for the interview and identification currently, Jenner has also unequivocally declared as female. I remember those early days myself, and my mindset that I could/would accommodate everyone else, whom I mistakenly assumed were acting in good faith that matched my own…I was wrong to assume this, and wish now that I had just asserted myself*
*Just in case this is true for Jenner too…I will simply use Jenner’s surname until it becomes clear where on the spectrum Jenner connects in*
Constance, here is a post from a Facebook friend concerning Bruce Jenner. While the opinions about Jenner as a person are hers, the concerns/facts about that vast majority of transgender people are quite real, and she so articulately expressed them.
Thanks, Nikki! Your words RAWK!
So, Bruce Jenner.
I am so tired of hearing this person’s name. So sick and tired of it…
There’s been this stuff swirling around across what I’ve dubbed, the “Transphere” concerning idols, and all of that…what a crock…
Let me first state that being trans is NOT who you are. It is a PART of who you are like having brown eyes, or green skin (I dunno, maybe you do?). A lot of people choose to make it central to who they are as people, and that’s fine…you know what? Those people can do whatever they want to do, but it STOPS there, with them. I’m not in that box.
When someone sees me, I don’t want the light bulb to go off, “Trans.” in the same way someone else you might see triggers something else. When this happens, we surrender our person hood, in exchange for an issue. We are no longer people, but instead representatives of an issue. Try doing that, and having a meaningful existence…I dare you.
I am me. My life experience has taught me that while being trans may be a permanent part of who I am, and always was, it does NOT define me, and even if it did, that definition it yields for me is vastly different from that of another person who is trans.
When most lay people hear the term, “Transgender” they tend to think it means someone like me, for example, someone just like me.
“Oh, I knew someone who became a guy. That’s cool!”
or,
“Yeah I have a friend who became a girl, he’s still my best friend!” (Obvious gender pronoun errors, because who their friend is, and identifies as isn’t important to you, only what they mean (or meant) to you. Grats on being selfish, and inconsiderate or someone’s inherent self-worth and dignity.
In both of these examples, what’s happened is that people think that transgender means one thing, and my oh my, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I will say this now, and I seldom ever just post it on my wall, but I was diagnosed with transsexualism, and that was treated under the care of a team of doctors via gender transition everything ranging from Hormones to Surgeries. My lived experiences are absolutely NOTHING like this person’s.
My personal feelings on this “Bruce Jenner” crap comes from a place of protectiveness. I am sick of this story getting air time, and these well-to-do 1%’s feeding their lusts for attention. This isn’t a game!!! People get hurt because of the attitudes propagated by this garbage….and that is EXACTLY what this is.
My protectiveness comes from the suffering of people who are trans. The people who deal with the shit from ground zero EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. We have the highest suicide attempt rate IN THE WORLD with almost ONE in every TWO people attempting. Then you have this person creating a circus of non-sense giving Cis people and others who have no idea what Trans is, so much ammo to continue the abuses, the bullying, the murders, the legally oppressive laws for us to go about our daily lives.
I AM SICK of it.
What’s more important to mention here, and I did hit on this on a previous post on a friend’s wall, is that as a “community” there really is no “trans” community, but more of a loose grouping of people defending human rights, specifically gender identity and expression. We can not agree on anything at all concerning who or what is trans, what that means or doesn’t mean…possibly because there is no categorical way to classify the breadth and scope of the human experience.
Fact is: We are all people, and gender identity and expression, while an innate part of who we are, is not the defining characteristic of who we are…but a smaller component of a much larger entity.
Get this crap out of the media already. There’s no doubt going to be a negative impact because of it, and I can see it all over our local news station’s Facebook pages.
I do not like this person being in the news, and I think it serves to do more harm than good. Most of my posts are usually much more supportive than this, but we’ve seen too many train wrecks with public figures, and I just don’t want, nor do I care to see social attitudes decline and make life more difficult for every day people like those on my friend’s list.
I feel the same way about this, that I do when someone with Autism commits a murder, and they try to lump all people who are autistic into the murderer categories.
Bruce Jenner is NOT an idol, and needs to go away. ASAP.
/rant_over
Now, I’m going tend to my garden. Have a blessed day heart emoticon
Constance, I likely will not post an awful lot about the Jenner Transition Announcement until she gets further underway.
I totally, utterly get where she is at right now. She is thinking things about how she is not that worried about pronouns, and how she is willing to overlook the othering and policing that is going on right now, yadda yadda yadda…she feels a responsibility to other transgender people to effect a graceful transition with dignity.
But deep down inside…all those things are hurting her, affecting her, wounding her. She doesn’t need me adding to the cacophony of noise surrounding her (and all of that exacerbated because of the family dynamics she married into). Eventually, she will begin to find her bearings and her voice, or if she already has, she will begin to express it in her own unique ways.
But I will be commenting on things that orbit her transition, things that are revealed and illuminated as a result of her decision, and here is one of them:
On my Facebook page, a friend linked to an article about her transition. That article is here:
What was telling was in the comments on the Facebook post, all generally very supportive, but one stood out to me. It simply said “Who are we to judge…”
“Who are we to judge…”
Constance, do you see why that comment jumped out at me? Yes? Jot down your thoughts about it…or No? No you do not see anything odd about that comment in relation to gender identity?
Well, Cis-Constance, imagine yourself being introduced to someone, and them very kindly and sagely assessing you and then saying to you and everyone “Who are we to judge…” and then shrugging as if to say “to each their own”…
as if your gender identity is something that is up for judgement in the first place!
as if your gender identity is an article of clothing that you simply decided to wear that day.
as if your gender identity was a moral choice you made or make.
Gender orientation is put into the same classification as sexual orientation and then judged as a moral choice, and this is simply incorrect and unfair.
There is orientation that is a given…and then there are behaviors that descend from choices that we make as creatures who are moral creatures and subject to moral constraints as determined by God and current cultural climate (and those are rarely congruent, btw)…the behaviors themselves are what I choose to do…but the orientation is who I was born to be.
Orientation is not moral behavior. It is simply the given baseline.
You as a cis-gender person are never subjected to the statement “Oh…you say you are a (fill in your biological chromosomal state). I see. Well, who am I to judge?”
And that, Constance, is the very epitome of cis-gender privilege!
Don’t get me wrong…I love the compassion that is at root behind the commenter’s post…but gender orientation is not a matter subject to judgement any more than race is, or that there is a brain in a skull, or that there are arms and legs on a human.
The deep underlying ignorance that is being exposed in the light of gender-education right now is the notion that gender-variance is a moral issue! The deep presupposition fostered in our binary is that any person who is cross-gendered is by definition subject to moral assessment should they decide to authentically live out who they are in spite of the external casing they are housed in!!
Do you see this?
The commenter is correct: we are not the judge of one another and should not judge one another. But the issue that she applied this moral principle speaks volumes of how far we have to go yet as a culture, and why we transgender people are subject to such tremendous othering.
Even the way we are supported is often times OTHERING!
I have the same internal response when people say to me “Hey, whatever makes you happy makes me happy”…and they are sincerely “for” me in terms of their willingness to accept me.
But they have no idea just how deeply they sentenced me to more time in the gender penitentiary.
“Mr. & Mrs. Cis-Gender Constance: Tear down this wall!!“
Constance, I often run across the statement “This has to stop” in connection with accounts of the bullying and suicide epidemics that transgender people face. And that is good, that people are beginning to get it, the monstrous othering and policing that we face every single G Dam day of our lives simply because we were “guilty” of being born into this life with the knowledge that our gender orientation and our assigned birth biology are at odds.
But I am restive with the ease with which in this internet age we can flourish our fingers over a keyboard and then move on from post with the feeling that we have actually “done something”, when all we have actually done is in effect restate the problem without attempting resolution. It is sorta like having a math test and re-writing the problem 6 + 11 = x as x = 11 + 6 (and we be sure to draw attention to our use of different colored font and italics).
Compassion is a bicameral quality. It has two lobes. It has the feeling, heart lobe…that throbbing, dripping, bleeding tender outpouring of sympathetic alignment if we have not experienced something for ourselves (and just so you know: if you are not transgender, it is impossible for you to empathize with a dysphoric person, just as if you are white you cannot empathize with a person of color…you can sympathize, but don’t deceive yourself into thinking you empathize)…
…but for it to be true compassion, it must have the action side as well. What will you do with your sympathy?
Lori Duron has again posted a truly moving recounting of a tragic tale of bullying and othering and policing that ended in another transgender life lost…and I will recite yet again the litany of 2015: a lost transgender life approximately every 30 hours since 2015 began!
As if it is not enough of a burden to face: the nearly overwhelming unendurable constant achy angst of dysphoria. Oh no…to that is added the onslaught of ignorance, fear, and hatred as expressed in the evil of bullying which drives so many to self-destructive action in addition to having to bear gender dysphoria!
But Lori goes one better: She posts people you can email, places you can step up and actually take action that extends beyond the hypothetical feel good phrase “This has to stop” and manifests in real, measurable action…and takes baby steps as a compassionate act.
And then I myself will go you one better: there are marches coming up in major cities…in June. They have various names, monikers…but at heart they are the same, in that they are opportunities for you to express–directly–your support with your body side by side with other bodies, facing gawkers and haters, the curious and disinterested, and others who have walked in solitary confinement in their skins…
Transgender Pride Marches.
Yes, there will be people there who look different than you…who walk or talk different than you…and who want/feel/think/need/deserve exactly the same things you do as human beings! Your presence there as an ally will mean more to them than any of them can say…in addition to the emails you write or the lawmakers you contact, or the PTA meetings you attend to make your cis-gender privileged voice heard that it is not going to be tolerated, this epidemic of transgender suicide and murder…and your other actions that you are thinking of and planning to take.
You are thinking of them? Actions to take? Plans to do something? Someone you can maybe even smile at? Befriend?
In the Portland Area, I believe Transgender Pride March Day is June 13th. I hope to be there and intend to be, God willing. I intend to walk, with a sense of presence and dignity (a word I use very reluctantly right now as it has been wielded against me like a sharp phallic sword to rape my heart and spirit, but I use it none the less to mean a sense of presence that contains worth and significance simply because I am a human being)…I intend to hold my head high and not angled down, and my eyes moving from face to face and eye to eye rather than always staring at the space in between…
I hope to see you there, beside me…cis, trans. But if I don’t? It would mean the world to see you standing at the curb, a smile on your face and a nod in your eyes.
This has to stop…this expression of emotion that lacks the manifestation of action.
If you don’t support in word and deed, then you don’t support.
Constance, I am pressing this, not because I am augering for any one of these things, but because it is helpful to cultivate an overall sense of not being compelled to police other people!!
Constance, this is a really good article for perusal, for it brings a somewhat esoteric but extremely important fact to the forefront: namely that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness or mental issue. It is a real physical phenomenon. It cannot be thought away, counseled away, or believed away.
It makes this point in that it compares gender dysphoria with something else that sounds similar…something called body dysmorphia, a phenomenon that is an anxiety disorder that causes its sufferers to spend a lot of time worrying about their appearance and ultimately have a distorted view of how they look.
It is not a sin to suffer from either of these conditions…but it is important to understand the difference because that difference determines what sort of treatment will be effective in addressing each condition.
Each of these conditions is challenging, and I found this article to be a good touchstone on understanding this topic a bit better. I hope you will take a look.
How do you feel about Redmayne playing a trans woman?
1) I don’t know that we really need any more opinions, but since you asked..
2) Straight men hurt trans women because they’re afraid other men will think they’re gay for liking them. They think they’ll look gay because society, largely thanks to media, portrays trans women as men, and gay as less masculine and valuable. Having cis men play trans women contributes to this and puts trans women at risk. Plain and simple.
3) This is happening and nothing is going to stop it from happening, so my hope is that the producers will recognize the issue and do everything they can to mitigate the damage they’ll inevitably cause. I have friends that know Redmayne and assure me that he’s taking all these issues seriously. Obviously it would have been best if he had refused the part, but he’s no Jared Leto either.
Tangentially related, and perhaps selfishly, I’m less concerned with cis actors playing trans roles as I am with the near total lack of trans writers. I believe we’ll have a far greater impact when we are telling our own stories.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like inside when I, who have never felt more present, more alive, more legitimate, hear that other people say that I have died, or that they consider me dead.
It’s a worse feeling than despair. It’s repudiation mixed with invalidation and poured over indifference and then shoved into my throat.
It’s at that point that the thoughts of making that statement true begin to assail and assault…like there is this feeling of well okay if that’s what they think then let’s just finally let it happen and in that congruence let them have a real comparison.
People say that suicide is the ultimate selfish act…maybe. Certainly this is something I have thought about a lot. But is it the ultimate selfish act?
What about the act of policing someone with the withdrawal of relationship and then acting like they are dead and they “betrayed”? Is that act selfish? Ultimate?
It sure feels like it is at least petulant and petty.
But hey, those are the feelings of a dead girl…and since I am considered dead what do they matter…and since I am considered dead why would anyone even notice when I am gone…right?
Yes…I am using absurdity to illustrate the absurd. But please: don’t tell me I should stick around and then punch me in the face of my tender hurting heart.
I am pretty sure I have pressed other things similar to this article…in my opinion it should be pressed by every wordpress blogger until it stops.
Constance, how is it that others cannot see that these things can be avoided with accessible health care, physical and mental, and the cessation of being called things like demonized and freak, pervert and monster, and then the slurs…
It made me cry so hard, because I often feel like I don’t want to continue beneath the crushing weight of dysphoria and then the added weight of every ignorant creep who thinks they are playing “pile on the transgender person”…and then the thought that I would cause such pain to others when all I want to do is have my own be over and the guilt is huge, for even wanting to, for even thinking about it.
Sometimes I talk about my feelings, and it’s not okay that I feel them about myself, they get corrected or rejected as not true and thus not legitimate that I carry them.
But calling them “not true” doesn’t make them any less real, and it doesn’t make it hurt any less.
I can tell you this: the more I am received as just a regular person the better I feel…and the more I am rejected, the worse I feel, especially when that rejection has the Name of God attached to it. I am fortunate that I know that God loves me and that I am Acceptable in the Beloved…but many people don’t know this and that extra little oomph just might grease the skids and push them over the edge.
“But Charissa…isn’t this all in your mind??? Cus demons and stuff??”
A young man has recently befriended me. He accompanied me out one day, all day…he later reported that he had never been so uncomfortable as he was when he was watching the way that other people stared at me, looked at me…the reactions of disgust, fear, slack-jawed amazement, or derision. He was flabbergasted that they would be that way…because he knows me. We have spent hours talking, and he has had the “benefit” of my counsel regarding his relationships with women. So he knows me to be an astute observer of human nature, a tender hearted intuitive listener, a gentle teller of truth that is at times somewhat hard to swallow, and above all a valuer of his life which is of priceless significance.
So when he saw them looking at me…like that…he knew for real that it was not “all in your mind, Charissa”.
The link is a good read. Please head over and acquaint yourself with the dynamics of how (surprise!) getting help to someone helps them.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
Constance, this is being posted as is…it was a question posed on a forum I read…well, actually, it was a statement disguised as a question. Don’t you just love when people do that? Instead of asking what you think, they tell you what they think but since they don’t have the courage to say that to you, they “rouge it up” all sweet and kind in the form of a question.
While the answer is spoken in harshed language than I would utilize, I completely agree with the answer.
Q: Possible confusion Do you think that it’s possible that everyone involved with gender identity furthers the confusion by focusing on labels? There are valid instances of people being less than admirable about pronouns and names but generalising about something like this could spite someone with sympathy for the cause. (I’m not saying you do these things because I don’t know you and thus wouldn’t have a position of authority to say something like that, I just want a different perspective on things)
A: I think labels are only not necessary to people who haven’t had to fight for their labels before. When you get assigned to be the average label and you agree with it, there are tons of examples of your label everywhere. You get examples of how others act so when you grow you can emulate behavior, you can ask questions about your labels without fear of prejudice or hate, you get to practice and live out the examples of your labels without fear of being hurt.
I had to fight, tooth and god damn nail, to get my label. Being trans is something I’ve been beaten over, lost jobs over, lost friends over, and lost huge parts of my family.
And for the record, if you see everything going on to trans people, if you see the undeserved hatred and the murder rates and the homelessness rates and the suicide rates and the abuse and the genuine fucking torture trans kids go through, and you STILL need to be convinced to be sympathetic, you are a horrible human being and we don’t need your sympathy.
Come close, up here, on the porch and draw near where I sit, hunkered down, clinging close, pressed with all I am
against this barrier thin, austere, and yet impermeable
thru which I see, and speak, and yearn but over cannot cross.
I get naked, bare and slick and covered in Her Oil
and hurl myself hard, fearless, face first pounding in wild flails
until the fists of my heart break and bloody grow within this cage
and sorrow rises right alongside all my heartsick rage
at being born here in this place so richly furnished wrong
at hearing music so distinct but dissonant from my song
Maybe we together can make a crack in this stark mass
and relieve my long days spent here, on the wrong side of the glass.
Constance…most of you who are public followers of Grace Notes are cis-gender humans. Some of you are trans (thanks for the support, family!! 🙂 ), and as transgender humans you are intimately acquainted with the entity that dysphoria is, and you know that thoughts of suicide or talk of it is often our most noble and courageous act of the day, because we are speaking about it rather than…
But I want to talk to you Constance (and you lurkers, too…yes, you are there), you cis-gender humans, so blessed to be non-itchy in your skin and of limber-lung to draw in draughts of refreshing air…you live in a homogenous world…a world that sniks together and is of a piece. And where it doesn’t, it doesn’t in the same places as other humans and so you find an identity and community in that.
You don’t understand how alienation from yourself puts you at a distance from everyone else and everything else…always.
Because dysphoria is like missing pieces in a mosaic of being.
You say to yourself that you are shattered too, and you are…but your pieces are present, and as you glue them back together they form a sort of whole once again…whereas the dysphoric person diligently and urgently works daily to reassemble the shattered image into a whole, only to discover that the crucial core is absent…and the middle is void.
We are separated from you always…as if you are on the shore of the sea and we across on the opposite shore and lacking the voices of whales to sing to you across the leagues and the deep.
So there is that.
This morning I am mindful of dysphoria and the gulf that it is around me, alas, and the challenge that it presents me in my quest to be a yielded vessel yielding blessing…I am mindful that there is also, somewhere packed in all of this, an opportunity to know and understand Their perspective and methods as Gulf-Breechers and Core-Restorers…perhaps this is my destiny, to be a restorer of the breach and a crosser of the gulf.
But in this mindful place, I have been remembering the words that a man spoke to me last summer, upon being let into my secret world of confusion and horror, that world of the transgender person caught between body and brain. He is a man who has in the past been very open in expressing admiration for me, as a child of God, as a communicator of Grace, and as a caretaker of my children. He has said toweringly complimentary things to me, things that I felt were far too idealized and simply did not adequately assess how flawed I am, what a failure I am…
…but he had said them, spoken of my impact on himself and those around me.
On that soft and lazy August Saturday, by the waters of a small man-made lake (which seems appropriate), we spoke, and I shared with him the struggle of dysphoria and how suicide is as constant companion as the sensation of choking is to the asthmatic.
He burst out in a fit of passion “Don’t you dare off yourself! It would falsify everything you taught me, and all you stand for!” And he went on to talk about how negatively it would affect him, and how he would lose heart and likely not have belief anymore that what I taught meant anything worth trusting.
That is what I am thinking about this morning…how easily and how often my situation is somehow twisted around and becomes all about the other person. It was like another situation where I had been accosted by a long standing acquaintance (whom I would have called a friend, but now realize that was me putting my view of what a friend is on someone who sees it vastly different) who demanded an explanation for “why you have been seen around town dressed as a woman!!” (quelle horreur!!)…and since he had that place in my heart of “friend”, I gave the full account, but only half-way. He cut me off because “he was overwhelmed and couldn’t take anymore of this”. And then he looked at me in sheer misery and said “What am I going to tell my children??!!”
See? All about him. His place, and his burden…as if that question needed any other answer than tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and begin to study these things together to help out a people in chains.
Well…that is a very similar response this other man by the lake had, regarding discovering my daily battle with dark thoughts. His burden placed on me was that if I were to ever choose to not be here any longer then I would be the cause of his faith being weakened and diminished and his life harmed.
Since that time, I have spoken to this man two times, once a day or two after a big crisis that was brewing, and then again at the end of October 2014.
Twice.
And since then, nothing…and I get that there are complicating reasons for that, not the least of which is my transition and he is a man. Very few men have been “man enough” to handle my transition with anything other than rejection at best, and murderous, venomous looks at worst (and those looks threaten far worse is coming).
Constance…is this not something close to suicide? Friendshipicide? Is not this towering silence some sort of death? Does it not underline and highlight the gulf between us, because really all that changed was his understanding that he was interacting with a woman?
And those words ring in my heart, part of the voices that circle me like wolves and nip and slash and bleed me out…
“…it would falsify everything you taught me…”
Well, I don’t know if it would or wouldn’t. Things are true and worthy of living regardless of the source one receives them from. But I know that this staggering abandonment does indeed make me mindful of how those words are true from my perspective. Apparently, I am no longer those “three C’s” to him…Child, Communicator, Caretaker. Now, I am simply “It which must be avoided, lest whatever ails it somehow infect me”.
As to the other man…that was the last time we spoke, in September, with a terse letter being the final salvo and manifesto of that declaration of war religion has filed on me…and sadly, I have reason to know the sense of duty fulfilled and integrity maintained, and sweet sadness at doing the “hard but right thing” which follows the writing and delivering of such a letter…
…it is such an awful feedback loop of legalism and lies and lack of life (death).
It is difficult being the friend or relative of a transgender person. You get caught up in the punishments they are meted for their gender-crimes. You get branded with the Scarlet TL to match their Scarlet T (“tranny-lover” and “tranny”)…
…and you get confronted again and again and again with that gulf uncrossable, that breech unbridgeable, and the dysphoric human’s many-sided and alienated existence when you yourself live in a world where such concepts as sides and incongruency are understood in the brain alone and denied in the bones, those non-dysphoric congruent bones.
I am watching “Romeo and Juliet” right now, the 1954 version directed by Renato Castellani (huge giggles here, ddh)…this play has long been my very favorite Shakespearean play (followed closely by Henry the 5th). It is tragically striking, how I am in one being a Montague and Capulet, and both Romeo and Juliet…it is in a sense a tableau of dysphoria and the solution is inferred in the tragic ending…only loving acceptance and dogged commitment can validate a life and overcome abandonment.
And there is a timeless line (distinct from the rest of that genius’s timeless lines):
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
I am still whatever Rose I was…and still stink of whatever stench emanated from me under the old costume I sported. I still live in the dysphoric House of Mirrors, and sides all around me with everyone else there and me here…I am still “Fortune’s Fool”.
…and as to men? “Friends”…well, there is this, from the mouth of Juliet’s Nurse:
There’s no trust,
No faith, no honesty in men. All perjured,
All forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
Ah, where’s my man?—Give me some aqua vitae.—
These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old.
I wanna see the person who will tell her now that they are enforcing the binary on her that they have sought to enforce on me…and tell her she is not really a woman.
Here is a crude and sad fact: in a large group of minds genitalia and gender are identical.
But we shouldn’t be pressuring people to come out. Instead, we should be challenging the expectation that others are entitled to our identities.
No one should be demanding that people take on the risks of coming out. No one except you can make that decision. Your identity is yours, and no one else owns it.
You don’t owe anyone anything – especially not people who are ignoring your personal autonomy and safety by demanding that you come out.
Constance…I face a lot of challenges in life that are in addition to the ones faced by all people simply as a condition of being in this world. If you have read here for awhile, you are acquainted with the gamut of these, and if you are new, well have a gander at the other posts ;-)…giggle.
My point is that it is the additional ones that kill. They are like the difference between running a marathon, and running one chased by dogs, and running one when you aren’t fast enough to keep from getting nipped numerous times on the run. And it is the nips that bleed, get infected, and drain…of vitality, of energy, and eventually of hope.
Right now the hardest of these challenges for me is that of making myself known to other people that are of utmost importance to me. They are mourning what they perceive as the loss of the person they knew, rather than perceiving it as the loss of the explanatory narrative that stitched together our common history.
For a whole host of reasons, some of them spiritual, some of them developmental, and most of them cultural/paradigm related, the onus and burden falls squarely on me in this process…to be the bigger person…to walk the second mile, or the third or the fourth, or however many miles must be walked…to turn the other cheek again and again and again…
My own identity is in need of justification, of proving, of validating, and the ways I respond either contribute to or detract from my right to be.
Judgement is passed on the narrative that I have, as it compares to the narrative that was.
Again…I get it. Fairness is not the operative determinant. But I want it to be understood: this is a costly gift, and gift I do think it is. It is not something that I owe…to anyone except myself whom I owe the debt of authenticity inner and outward. I think that my perspective on things is equally valid, is equally valuable and to be treasured. The “things I have lost” or the sense that “what I thought I had never existed” is just as real, as vibrant and legitimate for me as it is for anyone else who feels like they are being robbed.
Let me state it baldly: anything they are “robbed of” wasn’t real in the first place.
How about this: instead of the point of view that “a father I thought I had is now dead and replaced by you”, how about this: “I have a father who just happens to be a woman, and the idea I held that my father was also a male was an incorrect one. I am fortunate to be able to have this inaccurate understanding corrected while there is still time and life remaining to know this person that I valued and treasured as a father!”
Because this is my story…my history. I fathered four people…as a woman who inhabits a body that is biologically male. And as far as I am aware, my children always felt that I was a good dad to them, valuable in the love, acceptance and counsel that I offered them. And I am still here! The same person with the same ideas and same truths (and some newly understood ones too).
Perhaps instead of me saying over and over again I am sorry I am sorry…I am sorry for being…I am sorry for wanting to be, needing to be…maybe it could be thought about that a different sorry could be said…I am sorry that I held onto my own belief and insistence that a father has to be spiritually and biologically male and only that…I am sorry that I invalidated the lives and efforts of the millions of women who “fathered” young boys into men because there was no one else there.
I am posting this link, because it gets to a lot of the reasons why there is so much gravity behind the other narrative, the one that requires me to justify my right to exist, my right to pursue congruency, my right to be free from suicidal ideation, my right to feel okay about the truth that I did the best I could and while not a perfect parent did a pretty adequate job even compared to a cis-male…and as a transgender woman serving in the role of father and not knowing, well maybe I did an admirable job.
and maybe I suck. but I suck based on what I did and didn’t do, not based on whether I identfy as male or female…others who are insisting with actions that the actual measure of my being is in that identification are the ones who must grapple with the suckitude they frolic in!
Read the article…acquaint yourself with the myths…and then divest yourself of them for some clearer, more objective standards that we will all, together, be held accountable to…how we love one another, how we forgive one another, whether we divorce and separate ourselves or remain connected…those are things that will endure long after gender identification falls away as not needed.
Gender orientation…once again. In another brain, in another place, in another genetic pool, unrelated to me, unrelated to “demonic possession”, unrelated to “unsubmission and rebellion”, unrelated to “mental illness”…
…related to the gender spectrum and continuum of creation as human, male at one pole and female at the other…related to hormone washes over body and brain and the differences in how they align…related to a world that sometimes spawns cleft palates, holes in hearts, heart murmurs, diabetes, etc. etc. …related to a world where the miracles of modern medicine exist to alleviate suffering and give life fulfilled and joyful…
…pushing against your taboos…pressing against your prejudices…pounding down your judgments…piercing the veils of your ignorance…presenting to you new understandings…
…thank God for the director at the center where I volunteer! She knows what the right thing to do and say is!
So…there was this “specimen” who came to the center today. I know him, and he “knew” me…and did not even come close to recognizing who I was. I was dressed in a very nice American Eagle plaid shirt, soft pink, flannel, and a tie-die spink broomstick skirt, with a black t-shirt top and pink jewelry.
I looked nice.
But as I walked by, I felt his eyes, I felt his derision. I was in his vicinity less than 5 seconds, and yet for some reason he was compelled to refer to me to my director as “a dude in a dress”…
…as in “what’s with the dude in the dress”…
My director simply said “She wanted to wear a dress today”. When he sought to contradict that and reiterate his insult, she stopped him, and repeated herself…and then a third time!
I was soo blessed by that, what she did. She did not try to go into any explanation, she did not differentiate me in any way whatsoever. She simply cut him off, and told him that I wanted to wear that pretty dress today.
I don’t know which was stronger…the resignation and sadness over another insult by another privileged boy, or the gladness and genuine admiration for this strong and steady soul who sees something worthy in me and lays it out straight to anyone who comes around.
I think I will go with the latter…
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
Constance, I think I have posted about this previously, but I think this layout here is succinct, accessible, and easy to digest. Ya know, I have been thinking about the backflips that some people do, the contortions they knot themselves in so that they can preserve a way of thinking about a topic and not have to deal with changing a point of view…
…sadly, they place that point of view over a person far too often, and end up contributing to a tragedy.
It really is the ultimate in idolatry…a human life slain on the altar of the idol of their point of view.
Thank God there are parents like these, who understand the appropriate reaction to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.
Ryland’s story is real for people all over the globe. Please listen to your children. Be understanding and accepting. If only Leelah Alcorn could have known such understanding parents. Stop trans discrimination.
Ohhh CONSTANCE! I get so thrilled as we are able to “scientifically” demystify gender and thus debunk the superstitious taboos and unfounded prejudices against gender variant human beings!
When I first began my own research a few years back, the existence of intersex individuals immediately exposed the crux of the matter to me: if someone was created with both sets of plumbing, how did we sanction what gender they were? Even more basic, if they had both sets of plumbing and yet still strongly identified as one gender or the other, did that not prove that the determination of gender superseded a person’s plumbing? Did it not implicitly cede that the core of gender identity was wrapped up in the warp and weft of what it is that makes someone who they are…that persistent and consistent expression we call personality or soul, that self that exists regardless of what happens in or to the body until life itself ceases in the person as an organism?
Yes! Of course it did!
And now…the evidence is simply mounting to add visible evidence to what our hearts have always known…that we are more than our bodies!
It is such a shame that there are people who have made such misguided and ignorant judgements of a person’s moral standing or spiritual standing, on something as irrelevant as a body…
It’s an even deeper shame that those same people are missing out on the rich interaction they could be participating in here on the planet…
And it is riches irony when they will run into me inside those pearly gates, and find all their arguments and judgements rendered moot and null and void…and see me as I am and always was…a child of God who loves Them, confesses Them and seeks to live as a small imperfect picture of Their heart.
Reader…if you are one of these people, why not just give up now? I will still be friends, if you will play nice and keep cruel words in the only place they belong: the pits of hell.
How about you? Will you dip into the wells of living water instead of the swamps of putrid judgments?
Constance…ears are deaf to our pleas…another one has gone over the precipice of despair.
This area is the same one where some of my own dementors hail from, those truly baffling souls so full of hate that they are compelled to speak spite and make sure that they attempt to infuse my heart with that poison…oh yeah, cus they love me so much.
I am deeply saddened but not one bit surprised that this poor dear despaired in such a caustic and hateful atmosphere as this.
Ima keep on posting these things…you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen. You cannot pretend that reading here is the same as supporting a transgender person. If you read here but do nothing, you are like the rich person who walks the streets in -20 degrees below zero and tells the ones who freeze in their nakedness “be warm, be warm.”
Listen: it is not going to stop until you get you up out of your ease and privilege and stand with me! With us! In your community…and yeah, you will lose face and reputation and may be called a name or two…quel horreur!
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
For you science geeks…the biology of the brain is real, and its existence far more relevant to gender than plumbing.
It’s a bit dry to me…but the first time thru these things for me?? WOW! Eye opening.
But best of all, it rebuts the notions of those who think that I have a mental problem, a spiritual oppression, or a newly emerged proclivity.
Sigh…few things are more discouraging than the so called supporter who (ignorantly) says to me “Hey, if that is what it takes for you to be happy, then I don’t care what you do, be happy!”
Nice sentiment, but it is not a matter of happiness…it is a matter of identity. Not sure why that is so hard to get, but it is.
Constance, we are slowly discovering the biology that underlays gender orientation. This is a process inevitable, and limited only by the edge of technological advancement.
Most importantly, it is the same curve of advancement that has existed for other things that were once considered evil, the results of demons, etc. and are now seen as the reality they have always been.
In a generation or two, we will look back on those who thing that gender variance is a moral evil, failure or choice as the beknighted ignoramuses that they in fact truly are. They will be in the same drawer of history that contains those who opposed the civil rights movement, those who owned slaves and used the Bible to justify it, those who thought that epileptics were possessed by demons rather than simply the denizens inside a chemically unbalanced brain.
I have tried and tried and tried, over and over, to show you in everyway possible and all the ways you judge yourself and your own righteousness that my gender orientation does not impute to me any greater or lesser moral evil! Because it is not a matter of inherent morality! Anymore than your own gender adds any sort of moral texture to your own spirituality!
Isaiah 58 comes to mind as a pretty good list of things that would actually be far more pleasing to God than writing letters to people that boast about rivers that you will not cross or that conflate your own sexual proclivities and addictions with my gender orientation!
Directly speaking, I strongly exhort you to have the faith of your convictions and humble yourself and simply love. Cross rivers. Swim oceans.
But have a care not to make your converts twice as fit for hell as you are yourself.
Constance…nice to see that the perp got the obligatory “setting the corpse on fire” piece correct…right??
Sigh…always the post mortem mayhem and mutilation.
What does say about the strength of gender orientation?
(And no, Hater…the answer is NOT “the bitch had it coming”)
Well, at least we can all console ourselves with the knowledge that our Transgender Remembrance Day is gonna be soo great for all of us who live, and we will have plenty to preen about and feel ever so sad over as we break our arms patting ourselves on the back for how progressive we are because we cry and remember the dead ones.
Oh, but we must be oh so careful to never actually do anything about this ongoing murder spree lest we make the need for Transgender Remembrance Day disappear…can’t have that, now, can we!!? I mean, actually do something?? *Shudder*
Yes, Constance, you did a remarkable job in detecting my extreme sarcasm…get the point, and then get to work. This will not change until cis-gender people with privilege speak up and use their power on our behalf.
Constance, I am sure you already know about this crime, and so my posting it here is redunda…oh wait…of course you haven’t heard about it yet!
It is just a “so-called transgender woman”…poor thing just got what she deserved.
Nope…nothing wrong here. Move along, move along.
Obviously, I was writing sarcastically to expose the reality of the underlying assumptions that empower the continued lack of it being any sort of an agenda item to protect the rights and well-being of transgender people.
And the count rolls on…good thing we have a transgender remembrance day so her death will not be in vain, right? She can now serve as a lil tidbit for the cis-gender world to consume as an assuagement of conscience! A lil “transgender tums” to relieve the indigestion caused by the wanton devouring of transgender people.
Good Morning Constance! 🙂 I hope all is well in your life today. If you are facing obstacles, may our wonderful God provide you with the Grace needed to transform obstacle into opportunity, resulting in the joy of having overcome.
I am linking to this article today, because I think there are many people who read here who are allies, but still learning how to demonstrate that alliance in fruitful and effective ways. It is simple and direct without being buffoonish and reductionist.
Please take these things seriously…they matter to us. I will never forget how small I felt when I was told by someone who claimed to love me that they refused to compromise their faith and they were compelled by their conviction towards God to tell everyone they interacted with about me and that they considered me disobedient to God and in sin and deception because I had decided to transition.
To this day, I can feel that sharp sting, followed by that numbing zing like powerless electricity thru my bones…not good for anything but hurting…
I think the thing that really strikes me is how many things are done in God’s Name that are really a mere reflection of an individual’s own attempts to prove to themselves or to others that they are really and truly a Christian. In my case, it was as if this person was worried that someone would think ill of them if they did not make sure and let everyone know first of all that I was transitioning and second of all that they “knew” that I was “sinning”, but most importantly that they themself had sought to warn me and were thus the heroic rescuer who had valiantly attempted to save me…and their efforts were “unsuccessful” but only because of my deceived, rebellious and unsubmitted state.
That interaction left its marks. It showed me, sadly, that love is too often only word deep, and is forced into the template of self and put under the pressure of self-serving agendas, and what is extruded from that certainly is not love. And it is interesting that I have not heard from that person since…I think primarily because they were “shaking the dust off of their shoes” after warning me of what was going to happen to me: I was going to be outed at their own discretion, and then each person that I was outed to was going to be fed a version of me that came from another person…not from me.
But God is faithful…God is good. They have added people into my lives of such amazing quality and genuine heart! I have acquaintances now who I see a lot, present in my life and feeding in encouragement, truth, goodness, and love.
So it is not really so much about me, whatever “ruination” is come my way reputation-wise…but rather, it is about the words said about someone to someone else and then repeated again and repeated again take on a “telephone game” quality. Eventually they will come to someone who has gender issues themself or knows someone who does…and the full implication will communicate to them that they are not okay and loved, valued in and of themselves for who they are…and bam.
Another Leelah Alcorn.
Another statistic.
Another life tragically lost…
…and in the name of “love”.
So: head on over, read…get educated…and resolve in your heart that God is God and you are not, and that loving someone with kindness in word and deed is never going to sully Them or yourself. This would be the “walk humbly part.”
Good Morning Constance! 🙂 Once again I want to thank you for being here, on Charissa’s Grace Notes with me, and journeying in your own ways from works and death to Grace and Life…your presence here, your comments, your shared humanity brings me hope and adds ammunition for those lonely times in the night when all are sleeping, all is still, and I watch…awake on the walls. ❤ Thank you ❤
So the link above is from an interesting blog that is worth perusing. It lists several suggestions for Christian people to love and serve in ways consistent with the gospel, and likely far more congruent with the heart of Jesus Himself, the Great Friend of Sinners.
We have all heard the old saw “love the sinner and hate the sin”…heck, prolly a whole lot of people who read here have even said that. I have before…much to my great regret…I have indeed. When I did, I didn’t really realize what that said and implied about the person I was speaking to…and even worse what it said and implied about my own heart and self evaluation.
Alas…what I and others were usually saying is we think the loving thing to do is make sure the person knows they are a sinner. And quite simply, this is just not the way that Jesus did things…oh wait! There were times that He outright called people out on their sins! I forgot about those!
Yeah…it was to the Pharisees! Ya know those folks of that day who were the ones who loved to point out how everyone else was a sinner! He ripped them a new one over and over and over again because who they were in their own eyes was more important than who their neighbor is in God’s eyes…and that is fatal.
Of course I am not advocating “loving sin” by opposing the use of that phrase! Don’t be ridiculous! What I am saying is you ought to major in people, and minor in sin management. After all, your skills at sin management must suck, or Jesus would not have felt the need to descend from His state in Heaven, take on human flesh, and then suffer and die for you (ya know, a sinner). Right? If you were capable of managing sin, well then He would have just encouraged and taught you until you got it right!
Jesus never said “love the sinner but hate the sin”, and no one believes that meant that Jesus was compromising, prevaricating, or condoning anything evil. No…Jesus understands one crucial thing:
Saying Yes to Love is far more effective and powerful than saying No to sin.
The true YES renders the no moot.
And that brings me to why I link to this article, because if we are going to discard futile harmful platitudes, then how to we pick up effective and edifying alternatives?
They list a dozen, and they are “process oriented” and not items that you can check off on your daily righteousness list.
They demand that you see the people in your life as your moral equals.
They demand that you give the people in your life the same standing as worthy of God’s love as you have.
They demand that you understand that your perspective is extremely limited and insufficient by definition, as you are a very finite, very imperfect, and very limited being.
As you go, take with you my lil motto that I have pulled from Micah 6. It is a superb guide for keeping it simple and loving. And it has an order of listing for a reason.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Love, Charissa
“Let’s hope this will be the year when we stop using language that invalidates transgender and nonbinary people. Our gender is as valid as everyone else’s.”
Okay, so you wanna know what it is like to be transgender? Well…read the article at the link above. It is the story of a natal male who was horribly maimed during circumcision and was then subjected to a further mutilation of his body to “change him into a girl”. The theory was that gender identity was purely a matter of external plumbing, and that if this little person “woke up” and saw their external plumbing was female, and that their clothes were female and their name was female and they were treated as female by everyone else, well they would just “be female”, case closed and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except it was an illusion. A tragic and horrible illusion. And it ended in suicide after 38 years of horror and suffering. The article explains that all very well.
So how does it relate to a transgender person? It goes to the location and seat of gender identity! Under the current paradigm of the binary gender orientation, I am defined by my external plumbing. From birth, I have been named, dressed, treated and socialized in the role consistent with my external genetalia, regardless of how I feel, think, or see the world which is totally the opposite…and this contradiction results in the same sorts of feelings and reactions as this poor soul in the article. Oh, I processed things a bit different, but as I read of his despair, well it was too close to home.
Imagine for a moment: if you woke up tomorrow, and all your clothes were the other gender…everyone you knew called you by a name that felt like sand in your own mouth and heart…you were expected to excel in the roles assigned by the opposite gender…you were expected to “know” the things the opposite gender has as inherent to them…
Maybe even at first you would think “cool”, what a chance to see the other side! (Disregard the fact that you have prior experience already “seeing” your correct and natural side and would carry that experience with you as a help and buffer…we transgender people don’t even have that much).
But eventually, you would tire of this…enough, you would think. I am going back to my real self, laying all this crap aside.
Oh but wait! Everyone everywhere and every arm of society is now poised against you like the bramble bushes that were against Prince Charming as he sought to set Sleeping Beauty free! It is all one giant Mirkwood filled with Shelobs and worse! You show up to work wearing your right clothes and get mocked, threatened and terminated.
I think you get my point.
Gender is not located in external plumbing, and when your internal sense of gender and your external manifestation of this don’t line up the conflict is cataclysmic!
But the reverse is also true! When a person’s body is surgically attended to with skill and care, and brought into alignment with the internal sense of gender, why voila! The conflict dramatically diminishes and even disappears…and normal life happiness results.
We have always been taught not to judge a book by its cover. We are taught that it is not outward appearance that impresses God, for They regard the heart and assess that. So why in the world do we insist on imposing gender standards from the outside in, rather than discovering who our family and friends are from the inside out?
Listen: being transgender is not a mental illness. It is not a demonic spirit, any more than epilepsy is either of those…or a cleft palate is either of those…or a leaky heart valve is either of those.
Being transgender is a state of being, one that has been a part of the human experience of gender as far back as historical records extend, and it is across all cultures and races…it is something that is a function of the core of some people’s lives…
BUT: if this condition is left untreated, then that neglect can result in horrible consequences: addictions, depressions, emotional and spiritual despairs, and ultimately the overwhelming desire to not hurt anymore, suicide.
But no…for some reason that completely mystifies me, we think that transgender humans are “adopting a lifestyle” or “adopting a new sexual proclivity” or are “seeking to overthrow marriage” or “rebelling against God”, or “are freaks” or…or…or…
It never ends, those “or”s.
If you are an ally, thank you, and please continue to support with your time, talent and treasure until these lies are shattered and a whole beautiful segment of humanity is liberated.
But if you aren’t…if you are “neutral” or simply new or think it is blechy…well just imagine if you were forced…yeah. Not good.
I am a letter, and the envelope I am in has changed…a lot. But I am still the same letter I always was…and if you have courage, maybe I will let you read me! 🙂
Dear Constance…I would be honored if you would read the article I linked to above. It is about a real thing, a thing that I am experiencing more and more each day that goes by.
For real…transmisogyny is real. I know first hand.
I want to tell you something: if someone you know is transphobic and/or transmisogynistic, and you know better but do not stick up for the transgender people you know, then you are empowering that transphobia/misogyny.
They are not going to truly understand and get it that it is not okay to be that way until it hits them directly…affects them directly, and with consequences.
Constance…this is not the ranting of a shrill disenfranchised jealous outcast. I was for 53 years considered amongst the brightest and the best. I am a college graduate, with a 4.0 GPA since I was in the 7th grade. I was a respected speaker, thinker, and leader.
And then I committed “Gender Murder” when I chose to transition and become myself…I was guilty of two unforgivable sins in our patriarchy: first, choosing to be female when I could simply “be” male…and second: “wasting a perfectly good man” as I was told…literally told that.
Did you get that? To be a woman when I could continue to fake it as a man was a waste.
Cis-Sisters: when you allow transmisogyny/phobia to occur in your presence, you actually reinforce your own worth-less-ness in the eyes of the patriarchy in general and the person hating in specific!
Cis-brothers: when you allow people to hate on transgender people, especially when you allow other males to do that, you are tacitly hating too…and you are not only hating transgender people, you are devaluing your own wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers and female friends. You make a mockery of nobility and civility and honor.
Strong words.
I know, right? The nerve of me…pleading for sincere and honest action to back up words with.
But hey…it’s either that, and the potential discomfort it will cause for a bit, or it is stay silent, and work on that Transgender Remembrance Day Roster for next November…and you can sit in silence and feel good about your courageous acknowledgement of more dead people while their blood cries out in echo of the previous year’s…and the previous year’s…and…and…
My prayer is that one day we don’t even know what a transgender remembrance day is…because there is no more need for one.
PS: If you are reading and thinking “but I don’t even know a transgender person” then I will clue you in: you likely do, but don’t know they are transgender…and even if you don’t, then I ask why not? If you have sympathy with our plight, there are services you can volunteer with, there are transgender people who need help, and all of us need a friend.
PPS: And you still should make sure those around you know that it is not okay to be misogynistic/phobic, trans- or otherwise.
I ran across this article this morning, and of course was interested to read of this historical recounting of an amazing year of awareness growing…
…and yet, somehow, I found it strangely disconnected from my own life. In the midst of these events, I swam in my own seas of trial, toil, sorrow and joy.
My own year:
In early January, I went to my therapist dressed as myself…outside in public. It terrified me and I thought I would die of fear. When I walked into her office, she cried in joy. Her tears are jewels in my memory.
In late January I had my ears pierced, and though it hurt like crazy, I was ecstatic. A week later, I was derisively interrogated by subordinates at work “what the F**k had I done with my ears?”. That particular brand of self-loathing, shame, fear and anger gave me its first sip…it is not intoxicating. It is hell.
In February, I began HRT…and the horror fires banked so long in forges that rival Mordor in despair began to diminish, and then extinguish, and streams of mercy clear and relief substantial coursed through my veins…and who I am began to blossom and bloom…I was well named at birth, if it is considered what that sort of thing is destined to do…
In April, I had more experiences at work that were distressing. I also joined my poetry group, and that cadre of people who have only ever known me as myself are such salt of the earth wonders, who simply know me as Charissa, the odd poetess. One beautiful woman in particular has taken me under her wing…and on that first fearful night, she looked at me with open face and clear eyes.
In Spring and summer, I sold my truck and used the proceeds to fund my transition…of this I can only refer you to those months.
In summer a relationship that is very significant to me began to be built, the first one, in fact, as me Charissa. It is a very simple one in its arc and scope…it is very complex in that it is unfolding from the end to the beginning, and someday we shall arrive where we are meant to begin. It is encumbered with obstacles, none insurmountable but all onerous…distance, time, and prejudice rooted in ignorance and fed by distrust are outside forces that have so far driven us on with sails full before those winds, and we have sailed to many wondrous shores…may there ever be another, DDH…ever be another until the Last.
And in the autumn, I took my own journey down The Green Mile that most of my sisters walk…I was murdered professionally, guilty of the crime of becoming myself and throwing off the chains of privilege and white male power and position.
This is the ultimate crime in our patriarchy.
A human being, born biologically as an XY chromosome-assigned being, and granted all the accompanying privileges, rights and riches, power and position, initiated into the ways of “men” and present in their spaces…this human considers all that as utter futility compared to the all surpassing richness of being myself and authentic…and I am unabashedly thrilled to be myself…I openly declare being a woman to be the better destiny and life.
For those crimes I had to die. I have been put in my place, and my tale of woe would be recognized by any woman anywhere who sought to be herself in places she was not permitted to be.
Since that moment life is full of unbecoming…unwrapping, unraveling…the chrysalis is split and the butterfly within is terrified as its house and covering is torn asunder…only the future will inform her she can fly while she writhes in the clutches of the threatening lonely present.
Abandoned by friends, neglected by loved ones, showered by Mama, constantly encouraged by one…the heart of my heart and constant support and nearly my life itself…
…that is the year in review for me. A year of portent. Perhaps the overall macro view contrasted with the small view of this flea will give you some perspective in the issues we face that cis-gender people take for granted.
May 2015 contain triumph to match the certain tears…may there be joy enough to overcome my fears…and may I find somehow the grace to continue on, in the midst of lonely silence and neglect and need, laying aside my own selfish point of view and greed to feed and care for myself…may I be a vessel poured out over and over again, trusting Mama to fill me full and looking never to others.
Blessings to you Constance…and deepest heart gratitude that you are reading here this day. Your support has been so precious and invaluable.
Charissa Grace…a butterfly emerging and persistent.
Constance, I have pressed several articles by Brynn…here is another scintillating one, very informative and helpful in educating those who wish to learn.
As to those who don’t wish to learn, don’t waste your breath there, that is what I am learning!
The main reason that I am pressing this: it gives me opportunity to talk about regret.
Regrets…oh how they haunt me.
I regret that some how some way I am distanced from the ones I love most (except for my baby and Them, thank GOD!).
I regret that I have a different understanding and experience of what love and relationship is than they do.
I regret that I then blame myself for this.
I regret that I no longer have any idea what it means to be a friend…the things that I think it means are so vastly different than the things that other people think it means…at least, in the language of deeds…
I regret that there are people who have turned on a dime and cut me out of their lives because they found out I am transgender…and even more who have simply faded away, carrying on as if I have died.
I regret that my pace and that of the rest of the world are so out of sync, so different. In some ways I wander lands so free and boundless that they seem to never come to an end…and in other ways I am so chained and static and marooned behind prison walls that bar me from my true north place.
I regret that I feel like anathema to some, and a trophy to others…these two groups are mirror images of each other…neither of them likes me, knows me, but each of them loves to have my pelt mounted to their heart’s wall.
I regret that I am not a better person.
But transition? Come out? Be honest with myself and the world?
Well, I will never ever regret that, and only wish I had found my moment sooner.
God knows the timing of that moment, and just as when the Child came to us “when the moment was perfect”, so too did my moment come.
Listen to me Constance: if you know someone who is transgender, and they have chosen transition, you can either be a cause of gratefulness, or a cause of sorrow…but your reaction and choices either way will not make them “un-transgender”. So wouldn’t you rather have it on your eternal resume that you brought joy and gladness, kindness and comfort to the lowly and hurting
…than have it written of you “this person kicked them when they were down, and helped them to kill themself”?
I cannot even begin to speak of how I feel after reading this. Thank yous to Lori for finding her voice to write about what I felt frozen by.
If you read this, and then go on business as usual, you need to realize: there may be someone in your circle of influence who is either bullying or bullied.
Your involvement could make all the difference.
We feel the tragic nature of these sorts of things because someone unique, utterly precious and beyond priceless has been snuffed out. But the same principle holds the other way: you…you yourself are unique, and have a power and a voice that impacts the universe.
But only if you use it. If you don’t, well we all know the black tide that seeks to erode everything and pull it into itself and its seething mass of hurt and horror.
Like my son, Ronin Shimizu was a young boy living in California. He was a cheerleader, like my son hopes to be one day. Ronin is described as positive and happy, like my son is often described. He endured bullying because he liked something that some people is “only for girls.” Sadly, my son knows exactly how that feels.
Last week, 12-year-old Ronin decided to end the bullying by ending his life.
I worry every day that my son will have this too in common with Ronin. Because the group of kids like Ronin and my son have the highest rate of suicide attempts in the world.
The articles about Ronin’s death report that in the years leading up to his suicide, Ronin’s parents made multiple complaints to his school about the homophobic and gender-based bullying their son was experiencing. The school’s response was inadequate and the bullying…
I present it to you again today…and it has grown, shrunk, matured and gained its presence a bit.
In other words I edited it.
Please…read it and let the reality of it hit your heart with the tattoo needle and not the jester’s feather. Please be changed…how can we live if you won’t unbend, unfold and become? I am right there with you Constance, wings straining for every weft of breeze, sails hoisted and praying for that puff divine and transformative…
Love, Charissa
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Bleeding Light and Memory (2014 version)
When light struck my soul I blazed fierce and exultant!
Into awareness, I bled joy so radiant just like the horizon
bleeds sunlight at dawn. I gazed in the gawky glass of exultation
(and I in my youth seeing darkly thru that glass)
I knew myself and was gaudiloquent and I was so glad and full,
I was so wonder-full.Til it rained, titters fell tinkling down on heart-tin, then rebukes raging, lashing at my roof and thrumming and drumming til I saw no more thru that bright young glass darkly, but dull thru a lonely storm dimly and starkly and everything eerie and glowing in green, and radioactive remarks so redactive and careless cerulean comment, alas! I came to know what I was and was not and I melted misshapen and crippled.
Then came the days long and same and repetitive,
passing by people of 2 kinds that easily pass, they belong
but they never see beyond, they never see inside the rose.
So I plucked throbbing buds, thorn blood price cheap and held them out
from my side of that dark glass wet with stormy tears, washy with rivers
of arrogant vain assumed presence attributing value and worth.
Life ground me down as it moved without mercy, a glacier inexorable
grinding in glances so cold and so frozen, that flow moving over
the dark silent boulders of being…I saw bones strewn round me
like gruesome pick-up sticks, cast-offs from careless hands,
players who tired of children’s games, children’s cruel nicknames,
grown weary they tore out their hearts with bare hands mad with grief
but the world grinding by didn’t care.Until at last long from those dizzy heights brilliant awareness burst over me,
bleeding in fullness and in terror tinklings, thrumming and cold and that
startling certain blue clarity…I finally remembered who I am, and know
finally what I am, that I am, and my long lament “alas” nevermore uttered!
For I am become me…at last, me…a lass.
That’s me in a nutshell, my story and journey transgender…but what about you?
Will you take time to think and remember? Will you find mercy today?
Will you find the care? Will you go gently with us into our long night,
will you rage, rage with us gentle and bless now the living of the light
that’s straining to dawn bright and final in blazing clear beauty?
You too are dual natured, corrupt and dying and incorrupt rising!
We share one grim struggle, together the dead and together alive
in one deadly bold dual to live. You….are US. and we are you…
but you without arms, without eyes, without mouths
we scream loud and cry for release! We cry out
for the midwives of mercy to meet us and make us
so beautiful for situation at last and delivered of our awful charge.
OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS FOR US.See us…and hear us…don’t fear us, don’t fear to see yourself,
come stare down your own stormy floods, sit and listen!
Don’t be afraid to hear us, we’re the voice of the echoes you hear
in your own fearful nightmares of being, oh Daughters of Pharaoh!
Reach down and lift us up out of the reeds and mud! Because of you
a whole nation was freed, and we too are Eve’s sons and the daughters of Adam,
but trapped and acutely aware we are helpless! Too often we’ve fallen
to dread hands and dead eyes of no grace and no mercy
and no compassionate symmetry!
Today…here…
Light strikes in blacksmith blows,
soul sparks chip off and away on this day…
I intention…remember
my own radiant flood
bleeding light and day’s promise,
remember the resonant thunder,
remember the frowning floods
the gushing gouts
and the othering stares
and the brutal don’t cares
of long years I walked
in the country of lost men
and longing despair…
I remember the pangs and the waves and the lurching
of labor as I, pregnant with my own measureless mystery
and full of such knowing began to emerge and break forth
deep-touched forever warded by Grace, and kept safe
from that pit which has tripped far too many and eaten them,
chewed them like Goya’s devourer,
Zeus eating every last child in his madness and horror…
incarnate in this patriarchy that rounds us up
into its abattoir death camps like cattle
and herds us into chutes and charnal house horrors
of slaughter and blood-spattered baptism.(let their fate haunt you and give you holy hush and give you sacred silence).
Dare. Look. Feel.
I will too, and somewhere
we will fight off those demons
compelling and fell
that haunt us and cause us
to rave and destroy…
Then we shall be set free to fly again
all together in one flock of birds
of all feathers and all calls
become One Glad Song!
We will dare to fly off
to the sun and beyond
where our song will bleed joy
and rain down on the earth
to bring healing and hope
home in Love…
Constance, you have heard me speak of Lori Duron before, seen my reblogs of a few of her posts…well, I am back reblogging (again)! I just had to!
Why? Because she basically wrote the model post for how to refute your haters/detractors/opponents/ignorant people very free with feedback/etc. Written with intensity and self control, scintillating and uncompromising without resulting to the tactics of fear or manipulation or ad hominem attack, she shows us all how to defend without defaming. I was honored as I read it.
Let’s all learn from Lori, and then take our courage in hand and refuse to let haters and ignorance-imbibers rule the day.
Last week I published a blog post about things said during a PTA meeting I attended at my youngest son’s school. I wanted to shine a light on the homophobic, transphobic, insensitive, hateful and hurtful things that some moms said during the meeting and show that as far as we have come in LGBTQ acceptance and equality, there is still much work to be done. And sometimes that work needs to be done in heavy doses at places much closer to home than we’d like.
Almost immediately, PTA moms from our school started commenting, messaging and reacting viscerally on social media.
As they did, I stared at the PTA tagline: Every child, One voice. I’m not convinced that our PTA as a whole cares about every child and some of the voices I heard that night are not voices I want speaking on behalf of my child. That being said…
Constance, I just had to press this for you…a smart and informative article on the “genderfication” of the clothes. Do yourself a favor and read this…and then make the obvious leap of insight…realizing “hey…so if clothes color has been dictated by fashion, tradition, and social norm, what other aspects of gender have been dictated as well?”
Here is my current conclusion:
The awareness of gender, and who someone is seems to me to be inherent with how someone is formed in utero. Everyone has a gender awareness and identity, even if it is uncertainty. That much is there pretty much from the start.
But the expression of gender…now that is almost purely a function of societal and cultural dictates and is not at all inherent or written in stone.
Wow, that really helps us…I mean, think about how much energy it takes to be all up in everyone’s business all the time, policing them and making sure that they are conforming to your interpretation of things. If it is all just a function of your epoc, why then there is no ultimate defense you need to make to fend of the certain doom of Ragnarok the instant that you choose to simply take logs out of your own eye and leave the sawdust in other people’s eyes alone.
Constance, I am posting here a speech given by Debi Jackson…it speaks for itself very well. Debi is a woman who loves God, loves people, and has a transgender daughter whom she is championing in a way that I am totally certain makes Mama proud.
Please check it out and let your heart be encouraged that hate can never ever conquer.
Debi…from me my deepest thank you’s and admirations for making a way for your child.
I am pressing this, Constance, because it is the chronicle of the courage of a person to explore the dynamics and politics of gender in a world that is gradually moving from ignorance into enlightenment in this area.
No…this does not mean that I want to date men.
No…this does not mean that I want to date women either! Quite simply, gender and sexuality intersect only to the degree that the individual person connects them, they are not inextricably joined at the hip!
All desire to date anyone disappeared from within me the literal instant my eyes saw my beloved. She is my “sexual orientation”…She is my “sexual preference”…I don’t know if I would have seen her if she was male-bodied, but now that I have lived with her these last decades, well it would not matter to me what body she had…she is herself, and forever my one and only love.
Just wanted to mention that because of the coming crap storm from my self-appointed “lovers of the sinner” who will say that I am (fill in the blank from their fetid minds and sordid imaginations and black hearts)…
Nope, none of that, I want you to please read the thoughtful intelligent steps of courage of a human being.
It is only circumstance that I met my beloved before dealing with my gender issues…who knows how the struggle would have been? And that is why the issue must be grappled with. Each person needs love and someone to love…even transgender people.
Charissa
PS: I just noticed that this article appeared in a different form at this link:
Okay, I just bawled my way thru this story…Oh Mama, please bless this woman for her faithful love of her son and of you. Please honor her for praying that prayer “Change my heart”, instead of wreaking havoc by climbing up on the throne and trying to change everything and everyone else!
Ronin Shimizu 
Til it rained, titters fell tinkling down on heart-tin, then rebukes raging,
Until at last long from those dizzy heights brilliant awareness burst over me,
See us…and hear us…don’t fear us, don’t fear to see yourself,
(let their fate haunt you
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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