Obla-di, obla-dah...

Hello friends.

Long time no see. Life continues to chug on, and so does this crazy train I'm riding.

This morning I had a brief consultation with an electrologist to get her assessment of my prospects for facial hair removal; I’d mentioned to her ahead of time that I was considering starting with laser, then cleaning up the stragglers with electrolysis, and she was super helpful in walking me through how to structure that (in a nutshell: 3 or at the most 4 sessions of laser, 8 weeks apart, then zap the rest until we’re done). I thanked her for her time, and went to work.

So tonight, when we were all home, I shared some of my morning experience with DW, keeping it as matter-of-fact as possible, answering her questions, but otherwise trying not to come across as too excited about it (she’s almost always uncomfortable talking much about anything transition-related, and I try to be sensitive to that). At first I felt like she was okay with what I was telling her; I mean, I’ve always hated shaving, and for years (even before I was out to her) I’ve brought up laser as something I’d be interested in doing, and she knows I’ve been slowly saving money up for this exact thing.

I think I was probably just kidding myself.

After talking for a few minutes, she said something remarkably similar to something I just read in Jenny Boylan’s memoir, She's Not There (which, by the way, is excellent, and which I've thoroughly enjoyed), which her spouse said to her when they were standing more or less where DW and I are now. As best as I can remember it, she told me:

“You’re going to do what you’re going to do, but I can’t help but feel like it’s another part of the person I fell in love with slipping away.”

It made me so, terribly sad. The real tragedy of relationships like ours is that we love each other’s hearts & souls, but everything she loves about my body are the things I most hate, and making my body more comfortable for me makes it less so for her.

When we got married, I was convinced that her love could save me. Fix me. That our perfect unity could make this yearning I've always felt, this profound sense of disconnection with my assigned gender, just melt away forever. (I spent the first 40 years of my life hoping and praying that God would take it from me, too, but He never saw fit. Or He couldn't. Or something. I don't know. But that's a subject for a separate post).

We've shared countless joys and sorrows. Built a happy life together. We're the proud-but-often-frustrated parents of two amazing teenagers.

But the gender thing is still hanging here between us, and I'm afraid it always will be. Our friendship is as strong as ever, but our romance is no more. There's no blame or hard feelings about this (at least I don't think there are), but it's hard not to feel pretty melancholy sometimes.

I have no idea what the future holds. For now, we're keeping the family together, in no small part to give our kids the best possible home life. But I think we're both wondering how long that can last.

Trans Awareness Month, Day 13 - Bathrooms

(This is part 13 of my observance of Transgender Awareness Month, my answers to the 30 Day Trans-Challenge.)

Sheesh, further and further behind schedule... oh well, doing my best here. Here's the next question in the series:

13) Bathrooms

This isn't a question. Buuut, given recent events, it's certainly an important topic of conversation, so let's go.

I prefer gender-neutral, or so-called "family" bathrooms. When those aren't an option, I use the men's restroom, but I never use urinals if I can help it, because honestly, I'd really prefer not to focus on certain... facts of my anatomy.

I realize that trans-friendly bathroom policies are a hot button issue for many trans folks and cis folks alike. Take the current brouhaha over California's recently passed law that allows trans kids to use the locker rooms (and play on the sports teams) corresponding to their gender identity. Conversatives have gone nuts, claiming that this will lead to big bad scary boys declaring that they're "feeling transgender today" so they can go into the girls' bathroom and... do horrible things, presumably. There are at least two problems I can find with that strawman scenario, right off the top of my head:

1. I seriously doubt any school will roll over and let students change back and forth from day to day. This is intended to be more of a protection for the longsuffering trans kid that wants to permanently be associated with their identified gender.
2. If the "trans for a day" scenario wasn't already unlikely enough... what red-blooded meathead teenage boy do you know who would actually risk his reputation by declaring himself to be transgender, even temporarily? The boys that people are claiming to be so worried about are, I expect, so misogynistic that the thought of anyone seeing them as less than the manliest of men is probably terrifying.

So, yeah. This is such a strawman issue. Unfortunately, however, it's one that opponents can use to create fear and uncertainty in the electorate. Which really ticks me off.

Yin/Yang

So, it's been a month since I've published anything here. Sorry for kinda dropping off the planet; it's been a pretty crazy month.

My family and I are currently on vacation, visiting our extended family in Utah, and tonight in family scripture study, we read Alma's great sermon on the atonement, in Alma chapter 42. As we neared the end, we read verse 24, and something clicked over in my head:

24 For behold, justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved.

(emphasis added)

Look at the pronouns Alma uses: why is justice male ("his demands"), but mercy is female ("her own")? When I was on my mission, I remember my mission president using this passage as the theme for a zone conference, and though it's now fuzzy and I may be misremembering his interpretation somewhat, I think it was something along the lines of the importance of having both justice and mercy, both male and female approaches to life, in order to have a well-balanced whole. Two sides of the same coin... the yin and the yang.

I've said before on this blog that I feel gender is not strictly binary in nature, and that I personally feel that I have both masculine and feminine traits, but a single "me" (unlike some, who feel they have separate male and female selves). How does that square with what my mission president (and maybe Alma) is saying?

A fellow member of the TGIMormons Yahoo group I belong to recently made an observation I kinda like: perhaps, instead of a rigid gender binary (i.e. just 0 or 1) or a single male<->female continuum (e.g. 0, 0.1, 0.2, ... 0.9, 1.0), maybe gender is more like a graph with two dimensions, one X and one Y (hmm, interesting that those are the common math terms and also the common gender shorthand), and every individual's gender identity lies somewhere on the graph. Most people would cluster around the axes, the majority of men having a high Y value and low X value, and most women the opposite. People like my friend Sam that have a sense of neutral gender would lie near the origin of the graph, near (0,0), and people that have two distinct gender expressions like BiGender.net founder Brin would land up in the top-right of the graph, near (1,1). It's not a perfect metaphor, but I like that it points to maleness and femaleness as separate-but-closely-linked traits, just as justice and mercy are separate, but closely linked concepts in Alma's cosmology, and you can't have one without the other.

I'm interested to hear people's opinions on both my reading of Alma 42 and my friend's 2-axis conception of gender. Sound off in the comments below, and let me know what y'all think.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Okay, I'm a few days late with this one. (I'm on vacation, okay?)

This past Tuesday was the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside to remember all of the transfolk that have been killed by acts of anti-trans violence.

I have a couple of dear online friends who are currently experiencing tremendous distress and hardship because of their desires to live an authentic life. Not physical violence, fortunately, but vicious emotional violence that threatens to tear apart their families and destroy their professional lives.

And why, exactly? Is it ignorance? Fear of the unknown? Is it an irrational hatred born of misunderstanding what "righteous indignation" is supposed to look like, and when it's appropriate? Maybe. But in both of my friends' cases, their avalanche of suffering has been triggered by the actions of a family member!

"Tough love" or not, that isn't how love is supposed to work!

But as bad as these situations may be, I can't help but think of those who have it so much worse. A recent report by Transgender Europe (TGEU), a non-profit organization that monitors these things, stated that by their count, at least 265 trans folk have been murdered in the past 12 months alone (and that count is likely low, due to unreported or under-reported cases)!

That breaks my heart.

There may come a day when transwomen and transmen alike can navigate the world with the confidence of relative safety afforded most cis folk. Where even if someone disagrees with your worldview, they respect you enough not to kill you over it. (honestly, that seems like a such a LOW bar to clear! Has humanity progressed so little since Cain and Abel?). I pray that day will come soon.

Gender, Sexuality, and False Dichotomies

Hank Green is one of my favorite people on the Internet. He and his brother John share one of the most prominent YouTube channels, VlogBrothers, and they talk about all kinds of stuff, from the fascinating and deeply profound to the nerdy and trivial. Today Hank posted this video addressing the whole concept of the gender binary and why it's an inadequate framework for understanding the incredible diversity of human experience (from physical sex to gender identity to physical and romantic attraction). If you've got 4 minutes, give it a watch:

Wasn't that a great video to share with people who think we're crazy and all this "trans stuff" is just in our heads? Life is, as he says, complicated. Or, put another way, as Hank's brother John often puts it, "the truth resists simplicity."

Anyway, I just had to share this with you, dear readers. Now I need to go to bed. Until next time, as Hank and his brother always like to say to one another, don't forget to be awesome.

Between the pink and the blue

Nonbinary gender symbol by lilfoxieroxie@tumblr

A few days ago on the TGIMormons mailing list, a member named Cassandra posted some beautiful thoughts on the challenges we face as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who experience some measure of gender incongruence. I liked it so much, I wrote a much longer reply than usual (full disclosure: usually I just lurk over there, and don't post much at all, so any reply from me is going to be longer than usual). Anyway, I thought her initial comment and my reply would make a good fit for here on my blog:

First, I want to make it clear that I sincerely believe that transsexuality results from divinely-inspired natural processes that are designed to maximize diversity among His children. Diversity is good and healthy. (Ditto for androgyny and other points on the gender map)

...

In a gender context, the challenge inherent to androgyny is hammering out one’s own path that will bring them to joy and exultation. Androgynes can’t use either the “male” or the “female” cookbook.

— Cassandra, TGIMormons Yahoo group

I was really happy to see her include androgynes in her very thoughtful post! Yeah, the more I ponder on my unique position along the gender spectrum, the more I think that's where I fit. Which is weird, because that makes me something of a minority, even among the transgender support groups I've joined online!

Often androgynes get forgotten about, I think, because most Trans folk have a very clear picture in their head of which camp they should be in, pink or blue. It's taken me a while to slowly come to the conclusion that I'm uncomfortable in the "blue" camp not because I want to be in the "pink" camp, but because I know, somewhere out there, there's a "purple" camp!

Like Cassandra said, neither a pure-male or a pure-female cookbook would feel perfectly "right" to an androgyne, and indeed I do bounce back and forth a bit in my interactions with my ward family members. For instance, I tend to lean a little more toward femme topics and interests when I'm talking with other kids' moms while waiting for my kids on Mutual night. Then when I'm in a gathering with other Elders, I gravitate to the guys that, like me, have a deep disinterest in sports, cars, guns, and movies full of explosions (there aren't that many of us). So either way, I'm able to carry on a conversation with my fellow ward members, and I think I get along reasonably well with everyone, but it's rare when I'm able to really connect with anyone, and I don't have many what I'd think of as close friends (not saying "oh poor me" or anything, just stating a fact).

I guess another way to say that is to say this: I find myself smiling and nodding a lot, simply choosing not to disclose when my thoughts and feelings don't line up with the gendered expectations of others. Sometimes, I'll speak up in Sunday School or Priesthood if I feel things need to be clarified — the notion of the Prosperity Gospel," for example, sneaks in every now and then, and certain interpretations of the Proclamation on the Family — but often I have learned to just keep my big mouth shut so I can keep my foot out of it!

Someday I'll find that purple cookbook... or maybe I'll have to be the one to write it...

Giving directions

So the other day I was out on my usual lunchtime jog, when an older couple in a minivan pulled up next to me and asked how to get to (a nearby hotel that shall remain nameless). The road they were on, a small, residential dead-end, just happened to share a name with the larger, commercial road where the area's high end hotels are all situated, so I knew right away what had happened (darn GPSes! They're always getting people into trouble around here!). I gave them directions as best as I could, bid them good luck, and continued on my way.

About 5 minutes later, it occurred to me that I give directions differently than most guys I know, and I started to wonder if this was another "gender thing." That day I focused mainly on landmarks (e.g. "you'll pass a park on your left"), rather than on concrete map directions ("go north on Poplar about 2 miles until you get to Hollyhock"), which made me think of something I'd read a while back on the subject:

Studies over the past decade have shown that women are likelier to rely on landmarks and visual cues, and men on maps, cardinal directions (such as north and south) and gauges of distance.

There's a Men's Route And a Women's Route, washingtonpost.com

Sounds like what I experienced! But in Googling the subject tonight, I found a least one scientific study which seems to indicate that these differences are probably anecdotal at best:

[the researcher] gathered data from a more natural context, by driving alongside a customer in a petrol station, winding down her window and asking the person for directions. She did this 60 times, asking 30 men and 30 women. Ewald found no differences in the directions that she received, with the single exception that men tended to estimate how far away the destination was more often than women did. However the men’s estimates were more likely to be wrong than the women’s!

Linguistics Research Digest

Still, there may be some truth to this. Not that it makes any difference, any more than if my ring fingers are the same length as my index fingers, or if my arms turn outward when I face my palms forward. But still, it made me chuckle.

Labels

I'm going to try dictating this blog post from my cellphone. Here goes...

I've been thinking a lot about labels lately -- what we call ourselves, what we call other people, what other people call us -- and it occurred to me that I tend to play kinda fast and loose with the words I use to describe my own situation.

I remember I was young teen when I first found the Renee Richards biography, Second Serve, that talked about her t************ and eventual gender reassignment surgery. (Wow, Android voice recognition censored that last T word. Interesting...)

Anyway, I think it was this book, or another of the very few my library had on the subject, that first helped me put words to the feelings I had inside... where I learned that there is a difference between "transsexual" and "transvestite". (I don't think "transgender" was really in common usage then, if the term had even been coined at all). I knew that I wasn't a transsexual, not exactly anyway -- I didn't want to change myself into a woman (well, most days, anyway). But the literature I read said that that transvestites get some kind of sexual charge out of dressing in women's clothing, and I didn't (more on that in a minute), so that didn't really feel like the right term either.

Now, fast-forward a couple of years.

Over the years while I've been wrestling with my GID, I've wondered exactly what it meant for me and my family. I know I'm not a transsexual. I don't think of myself as a transvestite, at least not in the "gets turned on by women's clothes" sense. (I dress because it's comforting and reaffirms my occasionally feminine feelings). For a long time, when I thought those were the only 2 options, I wasn't really sure what to make of myself: someone who doesn't feel very comfortable in a lot of the traditional male role, but doesn't really want to be a female either; someone who loves his wife and children and wants to stay with them and be a good husband and father, but doesn't want to be a "Ward Cleaver", Father-Knows-Best sort of a dad. These past few months, in reading a lot about this it seems that I fall more into the "squishy middle"... where we now have this neat word, "transgender," which seems to kind of cover a wide range of people -- myself included, I think.

So, that's my gender identity: feminine-leaning male, mildly androgynous... transgendered.

And then there's my sexual orientation, which, it may come as a surprise to some people, is really a totally different subject. Teenage-me used to think they were the same thing, which led to a lot of weird self-searching, because although my gender identity is a bit muddy, my sexuality isn't. I am, always have been, and probably always will be attracted to women -- and one woman in particular, my amazing wife. Sometimes I hear transwomen refer to themselves as "lesbian" because they identify as female, and are attracted to females. Okay, that makes sense. I also know of male to female transwomen that are attracted to men, making them effectively hetero. There also appear to be a growing number of genderqueer folk that you don't really care to be pigeonholed as either male or female, and who are attracted not to a gendered body, but to a person's mind and spirit, be it male or female.

I guess I come back to the point that I've made a few times already on this blog that things are just not as binary as everyone wants them to be. Yes, there are "mens' men." There are "women's women." And then there are all the rest of us.

Music and Me, part 3

One final note (heh) on music, kind of as an epilogue to what I wrote a few weeks ago

.

The other day I was listening to a podcast by one of my favorite, tragically geeky bands, They Might Be Giants. I thought I'd heard most of their music, even from the (relatively few) albums I don't own, but then a song came on that I'd never heard before that stopped me in my tracks:

How Can I Sing Like a Girl?

Now, it should be said that over the years the Johns (as they call themselves: John Linnel and John Flansburgh) have been incredibly prolific and have produced a huge catalog of music, not all of which has made it onto an album. (there are at least two blogs that I know of that are posting regular updates highlighting some of its weirder corners). In reading these blogs and listening to this podcast, it occurred to me for the first time that they actually sing quite a bit about gender issues! One more reason to like them. :)

Tall for a Girl

When I was a teenage guy wanting to be more like my tall Dad, I would round my height up to 6 feet exactly. Nowadays I usually say I'm 5 feet/11 inches, which somehow sounds better to me for some reason. Still, that makes me pretty tall for a Caucasian woman, since the average height is apparently around 5 feet/4 inches. Which makes me feel like it would be hard to find clothes that fit, and unlikely I'd ever be able to "pass" as a woman in public, even if I got around my hair issues.

Then again, there are women around my height, including Brooke Shields, Michelle Obama, and even Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter! So, maybe I'm not such a tall freak after all! :)

Music and Me, part 2

Last time, I talked about how music played such an important part in my wife as I grew up.

As I got older, my voice got deeper and deeper, more and more like my dad's gravelly bass. For many years, I just kind of went along with that, and whenever we participated in our ward choirs, I always sang bass. I like being part of the choir and singing praises to the Lord, and a lot of times our wards haven't had many interested male voices, so I've always felt welcome. Bass was easier, both because that's where I thought I was stuck and because the bass part in church hymns tends to be a lot easier than the tenor part, and anyway tenor was just a bit too much of a stretch for me.

A couple of months ago our ward choir started practicing for our Easter program. My 9-year-old son, who for years has opted out of ward choir even though his big sister has sung with us, suddenly decided he wanted to take part. His voice hasn't changed yet, so he sings tenor (well, probably baritone actually). Since this was his first experience with the choir, I wanted to sit with him for moral support... which meant singing tenor too. Turns out, with a bit of an adjustment in my posture and a small mental shift in terms of where my voice is singing from... I CAN sing tenor! The very highest notes are still a bit of a challenge until my voice has warmed up, but with proper support, I can actually sing tenor quite well! :)

I know to many people, this may seem a really minor thing. But it's been a huge confidence-booster for me in terms of carving out a more gender-balanced identity for myself. With my newfound ability, I've been practicing singing along with Josh Groban and Collin Raye when I'm driving alone to and from work, and it's been so freeing!

Based on this success, I've started trying to figure out how to adapt my vocal ability to my speaking voice too. There are tons of video tutorials on YouTube that talk about how to do this, some more useful than others. One of the big clues that really helped me was to speak from the throat instead of from the abdomen; it's really pretty amazing how much of a difference in makes just relocating the sound resonance from your chest to your head! I've been trying this on and off lately, even sometimes at work and when talking to my kids and wife, and so far nobody's said anything to me about it, because it's still my voice, just pitched a little higher. Wow.

It Gets Better at BYU

If only this had existed when I was there... I might have learned to embrace who I am sooner than my late 30s.

Is Gender Binary?

This morning Christian Taylor published a new post on her blog that got me thinking about how my views on transgenderism are changing. I commented there, but I feel like those comments could be fleshed out a little more, so here goes.

I've been reading and studying more on the subject lately than I have in the past (again, I'm finally approaching my transgenderism as something to be learned from, not something to be ashamed of), and have had some very interesting insights. In a nutshell, the more I learn, the harder time I have seeing gender as a strictly binary thing, either 100% male or 100% female, and not as a complex continuum of thoughts, feelings, desires, and attitudes that shape our perceptions of the world and inform our approach to it. I'm still trying to reconcile that with the LDS church's Proclamation on the Family, which I believe to be inspired of God, and which includes this passage:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

I'm trying to exercise some spiritual insight here, and I think maybe terminology is getting in the way a little. Mirriam-Webster defines gender as "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex". So in the common usage, gender is, indeed, binary, and the Proclamation's usage is consistent with that definition: all God's children are sons or daughters, and this gender is part of their eternal identity.

Now contrast that with a common feminist perspective on gender:

...according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons.
...
This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice”

So in this characterization, sex is binary, but gender is most decidedly not! I recently read a really great article about this on the Exponent, an LDS women's magazine. Seriously, go read it, it's fascinating. Here's a snippet:

Furthermore, the behaviors, traits, roles, and expectations of gender are culturally relative. I witnessed this first hand during my dissertation fieldwork in Ghana where men unabashedly hold hands with each other, wear pink, sing soprano, and like hello kitty without any reflection on their masculinity, “machismo,” and/or sexuality. It is also a land where women “provide.” They farm, they own small businesses, they occupy the most prestigious and wealthy positions in the largest outdoor market in the world. The variations continue from culture to culture in what fundamental behaviors are “male” or “female.”
...
The obvious socially, culturally, and politically constructed continuum of gender behavior gives me serious doubts about the concept of the “eternal nature of gender” argued in the Proclamation to the Family and subsequent talks. It is implausible and carries the remnants of Americancentrism and 1950′s idealism inapplicable to much of the global membership. Thus, is the theology merely a remnant of our church leaders’ generational and national upbringing? Is it the one and only true gender construction? Or am I missing something?

I think we in the transgender community do a disservice to each other by trying to "categorize" different types of transgenderism (i.e. crossdresser, transsexual, genderqueer, etc). To my mind, it seems like we're accepting the scientific premise that gender is a continuum, and yet we're not quite able to let go of the emotional need for tidy little boxes or labels for people. I think of myself as a transgendered man, and crossdressing is part of the way I express that, but it's not an end unto itself — that's just more like a means of connecting with my feminine side. I've been praying and pondering a lot about this lately, and I'm feeling pretty strongly that my essential sex identity, the sex of my spirit if you will, is male (I know it seems weird to impute a sex to spirits, but work with me here). That said, my gender is a very different matter, and not so easily categorized. My physical and linguistic mannerisms, the way I approach any number of subjects from politics, to my profession, to friendships, to church doctrine, to my marriage and parenthood — I fall all over the male/female spectrum, and I don't think I'm alone in that respect. There are a ton of ways people may express their discomfort or lack of fit with their society-proscribed gender role, and I don't think this necessarily tracks with any incongruences in the genders of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

Please note that I'm not attempting to criticize anyone for understanding these things differently. We all see the world imperfectly, as Paul anciently told the Corinthians:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV

I'd like to think the day is coming (Paul's "then") when we all will know one another the way our Heavenly Father knows us, and the fractal beauty of our infinite gender variations will take our breath away.