Transgender: being bi-gendered

transgender intro | 3 poems | Being bi-gendered

Gender is something it's very hard to talk about.

For one thing, it's immensely complicated, and our culture has barely begun to understand it.

For another, its something fundamental to the way in which we understand and define ourselves. It's a kind of foundation stone. And if like me that foundation is rather wobbly, or the wrong shape somehow, or even just made of sand, it's very distressing and very frightening. Expressing and exploring it tends to bring up a lot of fear and distress in others.

A man dressed as a woman, a woman dressed as a man: these are powerful figures. These provoke profound fascination, and profound repulsion. The whole subject is charged with powerful emotions, most of them negative: guilt, fear, shame, denial.

It's very hard to find a clear way through all this, and very important not to make categorical statements. I can't claim to speak for or on behalf of the transsexual community, assuming such a thing exists. I cannot claim to speak for anybody. All I can try to do is speak for myself: try to make sense of what has happened to me. And what continues to happen: try to understand who I am.

Because I think it matters: it has profound implications in particular as to how we define manhood.

Whenever I start to think about this, I think about Genesis. You'll know the story: its about a powerful and rather unpleasant being called God, who, the story goes, made a man called Adam. And he made a beautiful garden for him to live in.

But Adam was lonely in his garden, which seems to have come as a big surprise, and so God invented anaesthetic, took out Adam's rib, and made a woman out of it. And they went off to live in the garden and the deal was they could do anything they liked except eat the fruit of one particular tree: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So they ate it, as you would, and after eating it they looked at each other for the very first time, and noticed they were different. And this caused them profound anguish and shame.

And that's what gave them away. God saw they were ashamed, knew they'd eaten forbidden fruit, and threw them out the garden. He told Adam he was going to have to work for his living, and hate it, and he told Eve she was going to bear children in great agony and hate that too. And then he put an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance to paradise to make sure they would never be able to get back there again.

It's a nasty story, and I hope they don't teach it in schools. It promotes organised religion, misogyny, and all kinds of unpleasantness. What's surprising is that although our external circumstances in the west have changed beyond recognition since the story was first told, our internal landscape seems to have hardly changed at all.

Our culture remains profoundly misogynist; and the god in the story strikes me as a perfect image of the sexist life hating culture that has done so much to make our lives a misery. It is powerful, cruel, arbitrary, unjust: and profoundly insecure.

And the wrath of God, and the wrath of his angel, falls particularly heavily on those of us who cannot and will not conform to what our culture demands of us in terms of our sexuality or gender.

I don't know when I first ate the forbidden fruit. All I know is that when I was a teenager I became aware of the fact that I hated being a boy, I couldn't relate to it, it really wasn't me. And there being no other option, I assumed it had to be because somehow I was really a girl. Certainly I was far happier dressed as a girl, or at least would have been if I hadn't had the same time been so possessed with fear, with guilt and shame.

So I did exactly what God did in the story: I split myself in two. There was a male me, which was the me that had to function in the outer world, and a female me which I tried to split off from myself: put in a box, and lock up deep and dark in a secret closet where I tried (and tried and tried) to forget about it.

It didn't work of course. These are a kind of feeling in the end it is simply impossible to repress. They simply rebound on you; and rebound on you with a renewed strength. And often the act of trying to suppress them gives them a vicious twisted kind of energy that often makes them very destructive. I grew to hate myself. I hated my male self simply for being male; and I hated my female self for causing me so much shame and suffering.

I felt sick, perverted, loathsome, and profoundly alone.

I was wrong, of course. I was not sick, I was not perverted, certainly not loathsome, and most definitely not alone. Never was, never am, never will be. But it has taken me many many years to understand this.

I am sure that in every secondary school in Scotland right now there will beat least one, probably 2, 3, or even many more boys, and girls, just feeling now just what I felt then.. Very frightened, very ashamed, with no-one to turn to, having to deal with this anguish all on their own. And it is such a waste, such unnecessary suffering.

Its another reason why it is so important to repeal section 28. Guilt and shame never helped anyone. It is time to stop blighting young people's lives.

In retrospect it all becomes very clear: of course I was not alone. There are huge numbers of us: the reason we are unseen and unheard is because most of us feel so bad about ourselves that we go to enormous lengths to remain invisible. We are too frightened to speak, and so we remain unheard.

I think of them men who go to work wearing frillies under their business suits. Of the men who spend the day pretending to be ordinary men , and then at night, or at weekends, pretend to be women.

I know these men very well; I used to be one of them. We take quite extraordinary precautions not to be discovered; we go to unbelievable lengths to keep our feminine identities well hidden.

And if we do go out together we are terrified: terrified people will 'read' us: terrified people will know who we are: men in frocks. As if this was the most terrible, shameful thing in the world.

I'm thinking of so many unhappy lives. Lives possessed by shame and guilt. Lives governed by lies.

Many of us get so desperate that we decide we've had enough; that we have had enough of being a man. That the answer to all this anguish is to remove the duality of it: get rid of this male body and do all we can to turn it into a female one.

Surgery will help us here: for once, there is one thing in this otherwise hostile world that seems to offer an answer. It is not surprising so many of us grab at it.

And this is an important right. It saves many many people from lives of profound sadness and desperation.

It takes great courage: courage to face the disapproval, and sometimes the detestation of family and friends, to face mockery at work, mockery and often great physical danger in the street, and profound discrimination in the workplace.

I repeat: this is an important right. People have the right to take this step, and deserve every support for it.

What saddens me is how often at the end of it all: castration, removal of the penis, creation of an artificial vagina -all this intensely painful genital surgery - and the surgery of the throat to gain a more 'female' voice, and the surgery of the chest to gain more feminine breasts, and the (usually quite damaging) intake of hormones, the endless sessions of electrolysis to remove facial and body hair, all the extraordinary effort required to erase all traces of masculinityÉ at the end of all this how many of us remain haunted by the same fear of being discovered. As if it was a crime. And the only cure for it is to disappear.

I spent many years wanting to be a woman. I couldn't understand it, I couldn't make sense of it, I certainly couldn't even begin to feel proud of it. And how many, many times it would happen that I would see a woman in the street: usually not especially beautiful or glamorous or feminine in the conventional sense, but a woman with something about her that would make me long to be her. That would make me convinced that somehow she was more 'me' than this male sense I dragged around with such reluctance.

And I always thought I would go down that road in the end. But at the time I was simply fighting to survive. Fighting with all my strength to establish myself as a playwright, earn enough money to support my children; I was most intensely involved in their upbringing, too, and as any parent knows the demands of young children are so intense and so wonderful and fulfilling (usually much more so in retrospect) that they leave hardly any space to consider yourself. And besides all that, there was an immense barrier of fear and of shame. And I could find no way to cross it.

What surprises me now, now that my children are so much more grown up, and I am established, and I have the money and the time and the opportunity; now that I understand far better, and am far less frightened and far less ashamed, is that I do not want to go down that path at all.

I don't consider myself ill. I am not prepared to define myself as such: to go to a doctor, or see a psychiatrist in the "Sexual Problems Clinic".

I am not nearly so convinced that the 'sexual problem' resides in me; not at all convinced I suffer any fundamental sickness. If there is a sickness, I would say it resides more in the world around us. I would say I was not a "transgendered" person, not, as I seem to have been encouraged to define myself, not a "man trapped in a woman's body" (though it has often felt that way) but a bi-gendered person. A man who partakes of both genders. That my situation is not "either/or" - either a man or a woman; it is both/and.

Because in the end, or in the beginning, we are all part of a spectrum: we are all both male and female. Indeed, in the womb, we all started out female.

One way of understanding Feminism past 100 years partly about women reclaiming their male side: the right to vote, the right to be intellectual, the right to have equal status and power with men.

But men have not taken the corresponding step; we have not embraced our femaleness, our lost selves.

Instead in these reactionary times, men seem to be in full retreat: into a hetero-sexist bunker: of laddishness, football, Chris Evans, and Cardinal Winning.

This is not a good move to make.

What happened to me is only a very extreme example of what happens to every boy growing up in this society: we have to cut ourselves off, repress our capacity for empathy, intuition, for deep feeling and turn into a very psychically maimed being called a man.

This really has to change: we have to try to rediscover our lost repressed feminine selves.

Our culture is so profoundly imbued with misogyny that it is difficult to express this, difficult to understand what it might mean, difficult to imagine what we might become.

It is one thing to build a programme around votes for women; quite another to build one on housework for men.

Thinking of it makes me often feel very helpless.

But I can at least begin with myself: I can stop being invisible. And when I make myself visible, I can try to stop expressing myself in ways that express misogyny and women's domination. I can begin to try to make myself heard.

But most importantly I can begin to discover my pride. A pride which for many years seemed lost for ever.

And this is the last thing I have to tell you: that I am profoundly grateful to be who I am. Profoundly grateful, and profoundly proud.

- 2000