Topic of the Week: Excerpt Discussion

[Jennifer M]

To be 100% honest ,this excerpt makes me angry and scared.

Angry because the people in my life ,the ones who I thought loved me as is,turned their back on me.I told my immediate family while I was in the hospital after a suicide attempt.They just didnt care.That hurt deeply,I try but I havent been able to forgive them for that.I am angry at myself for not being able to.

I am scared because I am so alone.I have only the people on this forum to lean on.As Elizabeth says,I really dont think I would be here today if not for all of you.Even with all the progress I have made,the thoughts that run thru my head still scare me at times.Most of the time I feel worthless,thats when coming here,coming home saves me.As I have read here and elsewhere having support makes a big difference.All of you here have made a difference in my life.The one person who knows and hasnt abandoned me I only see once every few months.She has her life and I try not to burden her to much.I really make an effort to find someone else.I must be jinxed,everyone just has the same reaction.

I really think I will be ok even if I remain alone.I have found a small amount of self worth here and eventually it will grow and overcome the feeling of worthlessness.I know this because this is what everyone here says,so it must be true.



I am truly happy for anyone who finds acceptance and love as their true selfs.It really is very inspirational for me but at the same time I must admit to being jealous.I hate being jealous,it makes me angry with myself.

I didnt mean to ramble like that,but those are the feelings the excerpt brought out in me.If this doesnt seem coherent,its because I let emotion take over,I wanted to see where it would take me.Hopefully not to the woodshed.

[CJ]

The woodshed, Jennifer? What are you talking about? Perish the thought! You're home here. Always.

Plus, given how tough it can be to be who we are (and you can work that in in whatever sense you want to), is there anything more normal than feeling jealous at how another found acceptance? I doubt it. Don't be angry with yourself for being jealous, Jennifer. I mean, I know that anger towards yourself is what you feel, and that you'll feel it regardless of what I or anyone else may say. But still. While your anger is certainly not unjustified, it may be misplaced. Don't rip yourself up over the failings of others--however hurtful those failings may be. You cannot fault yourself for being who and what you are. This is the hard part: neither can you really fault others--even others that have hurt you--for being who they are. Forgiveness--the best medicine against anger and jealousy--comes from seeing how each person does the best she can with what she has and with who she is. That includes you. And it includes those that have hurt you. Don't go hurting yourself more on their account. Instead, come here and sit with us for a spell. Tell us what makes your heart grow heavy, what makes you shed a tear. And this, always: just be yourself. There's no other viable way for you to be found by the one who will love you and accept you as you are.

Love,
CJ

[Jennifer M]

Thanks C.J,

You always seem to know just what to say and how to say it.I will take your words to heart and do my best with them

[Andi L]

Jennifer, I am so sorry that you are hurting so deeply. It is very difficult when those close to you won't accept you or worse yet abandon you. For some reason those close to us have a preconceived notion of who we are or who we should be. When we don't fit that mold they can't seem to deal with it and act selfishly as if we disappointed them.

I want to tell you that you are not worthless. I don't know if you are religious or not but my faith says you are made in God's "image" and he doesn't make any junk. You may have heard the story of a young baseball player who wore #2 on his jersey. An older man asked him why he wore the #2 and he said because he liked it. The old man told the young player that #2 was his favorite number also because it reminded him of the two most important things in life. #1 is God and #2 is yourself. Jennifer, please believe in yourself above all else and be sure to take care of #1 and #2.

[CJ]

I was congratulated for continuing to love [my father], for being willing to know her. No one would have blamed me, I was reminded, if I had turned my back.

Hi all,

Maybe something like this was also said to Jennifer's friends or relatives, eh? Or to Jill's (in another thread)? Maybe many of us have loved ones who are told something very much like this by their own friends. That Ms. Howey chose not to turn her back on her father is a testimony to her emotional strength and independence of mind.

Maybe we can learn something here. In the face of such adversity, apply Ms. Howey's words to yourself. Something like:

I congratulated myself for continuing to love myself, for being willing to know myself. I would have no one to blame but myself, I reminded myself, if I had turned my back on myself.

The moral of the story? Don't turn your back on yourself. Have no truck with people who expect you to do so. Compromise, for the sake of those relationships that truly matter to you, but never "over-compromise." Do not sacrifice your most precious "possession": your Self.

Love,
CJ

[Absaroka]

I don't have too much to say about this. I do have sugggestion, CJ. Could each weekly topic have it's own thread? Otherwise this will get long and hard to follow.

My one reaction to the post is that the writer maintains that the high point of The Crying Game is when Dil is revealed to be of both genders. It was an important part to be sure, and I especially liked the part when DIl says that she thought that the person knew, what did he expect? But I really thought the high point was when Dil's boyfriend is rescued with the terrorists, the terrorists are killed, and so on. After all it was at that point that lives were saved and lost. Not to mention Dil's anger at the female terrorist she kills over being a "real" woman.

Sometime I should see it again. It was a good movie but I saw it a long time ago.

Absaroka

[CJ]

Hi all,

Absaroka,

You've got a point--on both counts. I thought about giving each excerpt its own thread but then figured doing so would only encumber the forum with a string of similarly-titled threads. Instead, I preferred just putting the excerpts in a single thread and leaving the responsibility of tuning in weekly to that thread to the forum members (to those that are interested, at any rate).

While I agree with you that, narratively speaking, the high point of the film had more to do with the terrorists getting their comeuppance than with anything else, from a purely dramatic point of view the high points (for there are two) are linked to a double "unveiling": one, when Dil reveals to Fergus (Stephen Rea), who has fallen in love with her, that she is, in fact, a man, and, two, when Fergus, the "terrorist with a heart of gold," reveals to Dil that he is responsible for the death of her lover. This later revelation came as no suprise to us, the audience, for we knew from the very beginning that this was so, but the now infamous closeup shot of Dil's penis was a surprise both to Fergus (who promptly went to vomit) and to us (although perhaps not to Noelle Howey's father ).

The main theme of the film, I think, is not one of IRA politics, but of sexual obssession. And, in this instance, what you see is definitely not what you get. It's more a matter of what you don't see is definitely what you get. Noelle Howey calls the transgender revelation the high point of the film because, in a sense, it's a gimmick, one that catches us off-guard. One need only look at the 1992 Oscar presentation for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role category to see that talk wasn't of terrorism but of Jaye Davidson's turn as a gal.

Anyway, Absaroka, thanks for the input. I'll try to find a way to separate the weekly excerpts more clearly. Usually, I put a new one up there on the weekends, like Sunday evenings or thereabouts. Tune in!

Love,
CJ

[CJ]

Hi all,

Herewith, without further ado, is this week's excerpt:

August 31st, 2008



Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood And Back Again
Norah Vincent; Viking, NY, 2006. pp. 275-279.

It was hard being a guy. Really hard. And there were a lot of reasons for this, most of which, when I recount them, make me sound like a tired and prototypical angry young man.

(...)

I didn't like how wooden I felt and had to make myself in order to pass as a believable guy. I had to do a lot of crossing out when I crossed from woman to man. I hadn't anticipated this when I'd started as Ned. I had thought that by being a guy I would get to do all the things I didn't get to do as a woman, things I'd always envied about boyhood when I was a child: the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with my legs apart. But when it actually came to the business of being Ned I rarely felt free at all. Far from being loose, I found myself clamping down instead.

I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point almost of ossification.

I couldn't be myself, and after a while, this really got me down. I spent so much time worrying about being found out, even after I knew that nobody would question the drag, that I began to feel as stiff and scripted as a sandwich board. And it wasn't being found out as a woman that I was really worried about. It was being found out as less than a real man, and I suspect that this is something a lot of men endure their whole lives, this constant scrutiny and self-scrutiny.

Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it's other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it's some kind of plague they're terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching. If you don't make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.

And that, I learned very quickly, is the straitjacket of the male role, and one that is no less constrictive than its feminine counterpart. You're not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what's expected of you.

(...)

Women... wanted me to be in control, baroquely big and strong both in spirit and in body, but also tender and vulnerable at the same time, subservient to their whims and bunny soft. They wanted someone to lean on and hold on to, to look up to and collapse beside, but someone who knew his reduced place in the postfeminist world nonetheless. They held their presumed moral and sexual superiority over me and at times tried to manipulate me with it.

But standing in the pit of the male psyche was no better.

There I saw men at their worst, too. I saw how degraded and awful a relentless, humiliating sex drive could make you and how inhuman it could make your incessant thoughts about women become. I'll never truly know what that drive feels like on the brain when testosterone is fueling it, but I saw how by turns brutish and powerless a man can feel in the company of women and how bitter and often puerile he can be in the company of men. I know how much baser that drive could become in the circle jerk, where the expectations of manhood again exert their noxious influence, egging you on to cover the need and insecurity with crudity or pretend potency.

My buddies encouraged me to talk manure and I encouraged them to do the same. We let out all the hateful air in our balloons like mad monologists with a cogent form of Tourette's. We said all the things we didn't mean and did mean and couldn't say in mixed company, and a kind of catharsis happened then, much like it did in the men's group meetings, but without the therapeutic self-consciousness. The company of your brothers can make you worse and better. Better because it lets you drain away some of the rage, but worse because it keeps you from talking about the pain underneath, because this ritual of male bonding itself is just another part of the manhood that's kicking you.

That's how it was when I was being manly with men. The dialogue was ugly and as a woman in the middle of it I felt soiled and frightened just hearing it. I was shocked because at its worst it was so much worse than I thought it would be, so foreign and relentless were the obssessions with bubbles and competing and hazing the weak guy. It was all there almost all the time and it made me think that many men are far worse than most women know, but then also far better, because I knew where so much of it was coming from and how hard it was to overcome. I knew they were tied in a thousand knots and tapping out their distress in stilted code.

That is probably the part I hated the most. As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That's it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance, and now after black bra feminism, we even get vitriol, too. We get to be bitches, at least some of the time, and people write proud books about it. But guys get little more than bravado and rage. Forget doubt. Forget hurt. They take punches. They take care of business. And their intestines liquefy under the stress.

I know mine did.

There you have it, folks. This is, possibly, as powerful a reason for the existence of male-to-female crossdressing or transsexualism as I've ever come across--a simple desire to be a socially acceptable emotionally complete person. What say you all?

Love,
CJ

[Carolynn]

Hi CJ.
Well, from what I got from the skim of the book, one reason she felt as she did was that she WAS NOT a guy. F2M transexuals are men mentally, with male brains. Ms. Vincent was a woman pretending to be a man, and if you are not the gender you are trying to portray, then you will feel unhappy. Really!! That's what TS have been trying to tell people for years.

Now had she been F2male, and in transiton and taking testosterone, she would have been well pleased, based on what my F2M friends tell me, and based on the way I took to finally relinquishing the male role I tried to project for all those years.

Men do not percieve their lives to be as grim as she portrays, almost in a stereotypical feminist view of the male gender, right down to the limited range of emotion. They do have a similar range of emotions as to women, and friends, very good friends, they can be more emotional and more vulnerable with. Men are required by social role to be more static in their outward expression, but that is a matter of role playing to hide vulnerability to put them into better positions to gain the symbols society marks for evidence of success and reason for reproductive fitness.

Ms. Vincent seemed not able to make the kind of really good friends, that most males seem to have, maybe because though she passed, she really was not and others percieved her difference, like happens with many TS everyday they are in the closet.

So, from my perspective, there is more that illustrates the mental difference between "kinging" which is what she was doing and a F2M undergoing transition. F2Ms spend a lot of time being "lesbians" in a "male" or dominant role before transtion, as their masculine minds are more comfortable with that situation.

It would seem that Ms Vincent is a woman who was pretending to be a man the same way that Mike Reynolds was when he wrote his book (The New Girl) about his experiences a few years ago. Neither learned all that much about the other gender.

[Anita]

Hi CJ--
I said I was going to lay out this time. I promise I'll lay off one of these.

She's harsh, but that's the raw view of what it's like. I loved parts of that male competition, but it's like saying that I loved the jungle, because that's what it is.

Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it's other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy,

Yes, that's a gppd description of it. New FtMs may not mind taking on that role, but I'd had enough of it by the time I was 50. I still have that role in some parts of my life, but no longer do I have it in all parts. When I show up as a woman, I've conceded that I'm no longer open for judgement about my manhood--I've already "retired" from the competition. For an older person, this is a relief.

[CJ]

Hi all,

Thanks, gals, for your replies.

Carolynn,

I thought along pretty much the same lines you did until I realized that Ms. Vincent wasn't really trying to be a man as much as she was trying to get a woman's inside view of the world of men. And, as we all know, that world is as diverse as is the world of women. Her experience of manhood was hers alone and not that of all men.

Having said this, her comment about men having access to a three-note emotional range is pretty much spot on, if I go by my own knowledge of the social world of men. Remember, this is "as far as the outside world is concerned." Emotionally expressive men will sometimes be deemed effiminate or gay... again, as far as the outside world is concerned. I won't suppose that men's emotional life is any less broad and deep than that of women. The only difference is, as things stand today, women can express those emotions more flamboyantly and with a far greater range then men without their grasp of society's expectations of women being questioned. In fact, quite the contrary; people will gaze quizzically upon a woman who's the strong and silent type, emotionally. Of course, all this is becoming less and less true. Times are changing. But damn slowly. On the other hand, all this is still true enough today that I can hear echoes of Ms. Vincent's sentiments regarding the harsh world of men even here, on this forum (to wit: Anita's post above). It seems that many men today find masculine roles just as demanding and as emotionally strangling as women have found feminine ones to be over the past centuries. Either way, we're not out of the woods yet, I think.

Anita,

That was a great post. Please don't lay off any of these. Your input is always enlightening.

I like the idea you brought up of "retiring from the competition." Hmmm... I smell a poll here. Anyway, the real competition ought to be with ourselves. And not whether we can be the best man (or woman) we can be but the best person. Period.

Love,
CJ

[Sylvia H]

I usually try to stay out of these kinds of discussions, but Ill make an exception this time. Mostly because I was writing in my journal just a few hours ago abouyt this very thing.

I agree with most of Norahs comments. Actually I strongly agree. I have every reason to believe that my brain was wired mostly female in the beginning. With nothing but negative male role models growing up. So I had no incentive to "act" like a male of the era. I had a penis, so that was the deciding factor on how those in my environment directed me to go. On top of that I was never given any indication that I had the freedom to decide anything outside that box.

Here it is 50 years later and the light comes on. Yes men are not my first choice to hang around, but I do know a few what Id call more balanced members that I enjoy a great deal. But there do not seem to be very many.

Im sick sick sick of titty jokes, crude uneducated rednecks, and those who have to make a competition of everything. I tried hard as hell to be just like them and it still wasnt good enough. So Im going back to what I knew I was way back when and trying to make up for lost time.

Sorry to rant. But the observations she makes hit very very close to home. Sometimes I feel like an idiot for taking so long to figure it out. But it usually doesnt last too long.

Sylvia

[Elizabeth]

Hi CJ,

I think what we are seeing is a female view of the masculine world. I can relate to almost everything she said and her uneasyness with the male world mirrors my own experience. Which does nothing but reaffirm my belief that I am really a woman. I do not believe that men are compelled to be this way, I believe it's their nature.

Her continual struggle to remember what she was supposed to be doing and how she was supposed to react reminds me of my own experience. Always that uneasy feeling that someone was going to realize I was not actually a man, but someone posing as one. I have known many men over the years, three brothers included and I am certain they fit into this role because it's natural to them. It all involves the competition to prove who is the strongest, fastest, wealthiest, etc. etc. I truly believe that most men love this competition and that is why it exists.

I agree that FtM transsexuals actually feel quite at home with this behavior, just as I am so much more comfortable with my role as a woman, which is why I have abandoned any attempt to continue to portray myself as a man, which is the best I could do, but at an incredible price, paid in stress, as the author described.

Love always,
Elizabeth

[Absaroka]

I think you have to read her whole book, which I did. She talks about a lot of other stuff as well, not all of it nearly as horrible.

She actually went somewhat nuts and was institutionalized after most of her research. Sort of like the guy who wrote Black Like Me felt like he was loosing his mind. Bear in mind that both he and Ms Vincent did this voluntarily, so how much oppresive is this to people who are thrust into this situation involuntarily.

That said I agree that she was very much a woman trying to experience manhood. And she also wrote about some very stereotypical experiences. Maybe next you could excerpt Max Wolf, who found that he became a man and had a somewhat different take on this.

What I liked most was her comments on the double bind the expecatations of women put men in. We must be strong yet vulnerable and sensitive, and we should be manifesting these characteristics when they want us to. It puts me in mind of people who used to tell me that I needed to be more assertive, when what they meant is I should be more assertive with everyone except them, or the women who say I should be more in touch with my feelings, when what they mean is be more in touch with the feelings they are comfortable with.

Case in point. We brought my daughter to college this weekend. I was in touch with my feelings, that's for sure. And my wife was fine with me feeling loss, and grief, and excitement and happiness for this new stage of her life. But my wife was not at all okay with the fact that like many men, when I feel unpleasant feelings like loss and grief, I also usually feel pretty angry. Another man would have understood that perfectly.

Absaroka

[CJ]

Hi all,

Here we go with this week's round (and a lengthy excerpt it is... sorry):

September 8th, 2008



She's Not the Man I Married: My Life With a Transgender Husband
Helen Boyd; Seal Press, Emeryville, CA, 2007. pp. 151-158.

Gender is the name for what kind of man or woman you are in social spheres, and your gender changes when the social sphere changes. It's all based on comparison and context: The most feminine woman in the world can't be feminine without the idea of masculine existing in the world elsewhere. Even when she's alone, she feels feminine because she doesn't feel masculine. We define our genders often by what they aren't more than by what they are, and we think that being masculine or feminine is mutually exclusive when it's not.

Often, ultimately, it's the bigots who decide. They know a sissy when they see one. Mostly. Unless a slender teenage boy with delicate features happens to be holding his mom's purse in the wrong time and place. To "protect" his son from the dangers of gender variance and homosexuality, a father recently killed his own three-year-old by enforcing masculinity on him: He shook him and hit him and taught him to "toughen up," and the child ended up with a concussion. This father didn't want his kid to grow up to be a faggot, and now the kid isn't going to grow up at all. And while a lot of our drive toward gender conformity is deeply embedded in homophobia, heterosexuals are not always stereotypically gendered, either. But gender variance in straight people isn't acknowledged, which makes it a little more difficult for them to live openly gender-variant lives. I didn't know there was a chance to continue being a tomboy or that there was a chance of meeting a feminine man for a romantic and sexual partnership. I had to find the trans community to even know such gender variance existed. Heterosexual gender variance is invisible for a few reasons, some of them practical, some of them historical, some of them a combination of both.

For starters, the dominant belief is that gender variant = homosexual. We believe, as a culture, that gender variance belongs to gays and lesbians. It's a tautology: All gender-variant people are gay and lesbian. She is gender variant. Therefore, she must be a lesbian. In a sense, there is no way for a heterosexual to be gender variant and still be seen as heterosexual; it's a Catch-22. It's not just heterosexuals who believe this, either; plenty of crossdressers can tell you how difficult it is to convince a gay man that just because they like to wear dresses doesn't mean they don't also like to date women. And older lesbian femmes can tell you how much they weren't accepted as lesbians during the seventies. The belief that gender normative = heterosexual (and its inverse, that gender variant = homosexual) is so intense that any man who acts feminine is immediately labeled a fag, and so faces the discrimination gay men face, and likewise for any woman who is perceived as masculine. To avoid being discriminated against, gender variant heterosexuals submerge or hide or repress or closet their gender variance. While hiding gender variance isn't entirely stupid, considering the consequences, it does make heterosexual gender variance disappear from public view. If they don't hide it, they're assumed to be gay, which means that either way, heterosexual gender variance is effectively invisible, which "proves" that only gays and lesbians are gender variant.

That heterosexual gender variance is invisible is one of the things that living with someone trans teaches you very quickly. And yet, no one would have ever guessed that [my husband] Betty was gender variant, because she hid hers for the same reason that I did: to date. Because feminine man = gay man in this culture, there is no way for a heterosexual man to both date women and express his femininity. Shoot, we're so obssessed with men being masculine it's hard for gay men to express their femininity if they want to date.; in a story that appeared in The Advocate, one gay man is quoted as saying, "I don't like it when a man opens his mouth and a purse falls out." But at least there's some kind of acknowledgment that it's possible for a man to be a femme, even if no one wants to date him. (Your average het crossdresser would probably have as much luck if he were open about his femininity, too.)

Because we pretend there is no heterosexual gender variance, there are really no alternate models of heterosexuality out there at all. We're all supposed to do our best at fitting ourselves into the preordained boxes. The lesbian community may have butches and soft butches and femmes and bulldaggers and stone butches, and the gay community has queens and bears and "straight-acting" gay men (which means, of course, heteronormatively gendered men), but in the heterosexual universe there are just men and women. There are no other names for "types" of men and women; there is little acknowledgment that there are types of heterosexual men and women at all, at least not in the language we use. "Sissy" implies an effeminate gay man or a young feminine male child, "tomboy" a masculine female child. I know I always felt ridiculous calling myself a tomboy as an adult, no matter how much I was one at age twelve. There is no such thing as a tom-man, no matter how much I am one now.
To me that's just another good reason for heterosexual crossdressers to come out of the closet already.

Homophobic reasons underpin why gender-variant people who like the opposite sex learn how to hide their gender variance. Gender-variant people can be especially homophobic because they feel discriminated against for something they aren't, and they end up feeling their lives wouldn't be so complicated if there weren't gays and lesbians for them to be compared to. The homophobia can be more of a self-hating instinct; that is, gender-variant people might hate that part of themselves that they don't think is "normal," much in the same way some gays and lesbians and trans people can be self-hating. Gays and lesbians might hate having same-sex attraction, and trans people may hate being trans; in other words, people can hate the thing that's causing their lives to be difficult, or estranging them from their families, and they take that self-hate out on others who have adjusted to their "deviance."
But homophobia isn't the whole reason, either.

First, there's plain old confusion. I was told so often and so regularly that I must be a lesbian that I doubted my own sexual orientation. Crossdressers guess and second-guess their own sexualities as well, and while some do discover they're more bisexual than they would have expected--especially when crossdressed and treated "like a lady" by a man--a lot realize that the crossdressing has little to do with their orientation. A person who is assumed to be gay can spend years trying to figure that out. Even when I did figure out that I didn't want to have sex with women, I still assumed that I couldn't be gender variant and heterosexual--well, at least not actively heterosexual, and what's the point of having a sexual orientation if you're not actually having sex with anyone?

There's also the simple fact of trying to get laid and/or fall in love. People want to fall in love with the sex they like; het women want to get hit on by guys and het guys want to be flirted with by women. Since gender variant = gay or lesbian, letting your gender variance "show" as a het means you get hit on by the wrong people.

(...)

The other funny thing that happens as a result of this foregone conclusion that gender variant = homosexual is that heterosexual people who actually are gender variant are pardoned, or their gender variance is kind of ignored.

(...)

And so, gender variance in heterosexual people simply doesn't, and can't, exist.

Except it does.

(...)

Most of the couples I've known who were variations on typically gendered people got accused of being closet cases, and often in cruel ways (by both gay and straights folks). Sometimes there'd be nervous jokes about her being a ballbuster or his being whipped, but if any gender variance was noticed, it was either (1) gossiped about in whispers, or (2) joked into invisibility. In either case, what I heard was never anything the people being talked about would take as a compliment. It's insulting to have your own sense of self and sexuality questioned by others; bisexuals and queer women often have similar experiences of not having their own realities "believed" because everybody likes the little boxes.

How a person's gender variance is perceived falls along the same lines as that old saw about how poor people are considered crazy but rich people only eccentric. If you're homosexual and gender variant, it's an explanation for what makes you homosexual. If you're heterosexual and gender variant, everyone tries to politely ignore it.

There you go. Personally, I'm a little tired of being ignored... however politely it's done.

Love,
CJ