Longing
What i really want you to know,
is the real me.
not what's on the surface,
not just what you see.
You see my fear,
not what i fear,
you see me listen,
not what i hear,
you see me cry,
but, what brings the tear?
if you could only see me as i am.
I deal with my pain,
in different ways,
at different times,
on different days,
but never in indifference phase,
and you never see me as i am.
My truth and joy are hidden, yes,
if you would only try to guess,
who knows? it's just a little mess,
but you might like me as i am.
Longing is a short poem i wrote in 2006 to try to express my frustration at gender incongruity and gender dysphoria. About how maddening it is to not be seen as you truly are inside.
The following essay was written for the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto's inaugural session of it's gender education and outreach program that I was honoured to be asked to speak to. Gender 101 is being developed to help educate the church and congregation about T* people and their unique needs, spiritual and social.
Kudos to Jon and Sara for their efforts
Being Me: On fear and its effects on a life.
Good afternoon Ladies and
Gentlemen. I have to make some assumptions because, as you may have heard
already, Gender is not always readily visible on the surface.
Now I could start off with some
statistics, Like “According to the DSM-IV, one in 30,000 biological males and
one in 100,000 biological females are transgender (American Psychiatric
Association, 1994). Newer data suggests at least one in 500 persons is
transgendered (Olyslager & Conway, 2007).” Or “Transgender persons have an
attempted suicide rate that is somewhere in the 31% to 41% range (depending on
the study).” But this is not a story of statistics; this is the story of one
person. This is my story.
When I was young, before I ever
discovered I was different from other children, I was nearly fearless. A lot of
this has to do with the fact that there are few visible differences between
boys and girls until around age ten. Any differences between sexes at that age
are imposed by parents and society and although I understood that I was
physically different than my sisters, I didn’t understand that I wasn’t a girl
and didn’t realize that I wasn’t going to just change if I wanted it enough. I
didn’t get the physical rough housing and games of cops and robbers, cowboys
and Indians or war… I liked my sister’s dollhouse and dolls, I liked my
mother’s miniature tea set, I liked the stove toy at my grandmothers. In
kindergarten, I liked playing house and school with the girls… and this apparently
caused adult concern, because I was pulled away to more appropriate toys and
games at which point I would retreat and read.
In my knowing that I was a girl, there
was no sexuality involved, I just knew and was positive I would grow up like
mommy. When my sisters played dress up
with me, there was no shame… just a feeling of rightness. Yes I was different
than the other kids, isolated to an extent, but I ran with both boys and girls
never seeing any difference, never afraid. I didn’t hate boys, I just wasn’t
one. Though as I grew older I felt distanced from other children my age. My childhood was isolated but never a source of fear. The fear arrived when I was
eleven. I had taken advantage of having a house to myself and was dressed
appropriately, to my mind. I was comfortable, I felt right. I was too relaxed
and didn’t hear my family come home. To them I was crossed dressed… I felt
their fear and it terrified me. I didn’t understand it but I could feel it.
They call it strong empathy, I called it terror.
Their fear was deep… I was the only
son and I was a cross-dressing perverted freak and I needed to be cured. No one
asked me what I wanted, I was told what was to be. This was early 1976, there
was no easily accessed internet for information and fellowship, no television
programs discussing people like myself, just rumour and innuendo. As far as I
knew I was the only person in the world that felt like this … to them, I was gay, I
would grow up molesting children, I was not normal… a freak to be cured. At this time, people were still very
comfortable being homophobic, making jokes and even gay bashing. Transphobia
wasn’t even a word yet nor was transgender. I was quietly whisked off to a
family councilor to find out how to fix me, and we made sure the neighbours
knew nothing of our family’s shame.
So, picture this if you can, I was
eleven years old and scared by my mommy and daddy’s fear… I was terrified of
losing their love. I only knew how I felt inside (girl) but the message I was
getting from them was I was wrong, twisted, sick somehow. The psychotherapist
talked at me for about 20 minutes about things I didn’t understand but would be
frightening to any child my age. Then, this professional Family Councilor asked
me, in front of my parents, if I wanted to be a boy or a girl.
I Lied. I lied
so my parents wouldn’t hate me. I lied to fit in. I pushed everything that I
was deep down inside of me so that my parents would love me. I began to build a
false face, a persona; I built him because I feared being me… I was him… I
hated having to be him. I hated him.
All of a sudden I wasn’t happy; my
parents couldn’t figure out where their happy little ‘boy’ had gone didn’t get
that their fear had forced me to hide. All of a sudden words like anti social
and depressed got thrown about. I started over eating and wouldn’t leave my
room. I wasn’t doing well in school because I had given up… I couldn’t
understand the role I was supposed to play… so I would read but not get
involved… I was tested and moved into a gifted program. I didn’t fit there
either…all I wanted was to be left alone… I couldn’t relate to the boys and
the girls wanted nothing to do with me because I was a ‘boy’. But I also
discovered one fact that kept me alive during all that reading… there were other
people like me, people who weren’t what they appeared to be on the outside.
I’d really like to be able to tell
you about my teen years, but the fact is that aside from some rage incidents
(no one was physically hurt), my teen years, when I was supposed to be learning
about socialization and interaction, as well as English and geography, are a
near complete blank. I’m not sure whether there was any bullying involved, but
I doubt it. I was fairly large and in all the pictures I’ve seen, I had a heavy
lidded appearance to my eyes… I think most people took me for a drug user and
left me alone. This was also a time that I would experience what I have called
fugue states, where I would be one place, like a classroom, and then find
myself somewhere else entirely, several hours later, without memory of the
hours between. It wasn’t till about age 18 I started to have any definable
memories at all.
During the years between 18 and 24, I read everything I could find on
these trans people. It was mostly porn in the late 70’s and early 80’s or
sordid biographies with lurid titles. ‘I changed my sex!’ or ‘Man to Maiden’,
but it gave me a glimmer of hope. But with that faint hope was guilt and fear,
fear of being caught with pornography or reading about weirdos. On the brand new medium of the daytime talk
show, Phil Donahue and other pioneers were interviewing cross dressers and drag
queens, but I didn’t relate to them, I didn’t feel any sexual thrill about
cross dressing. All I wanted was to find out how all this related to how I felt
deep inside, so I would surreptitiously find psychotherapists and try to let me
out of him. But if a real step forward was offered he would push me back down
and retreat in fear… fear of family reaction, fear of society. So I pretended
to be an over masculine chubby guy who did everything in his power to prove he
was a man… I joined the armed forces, I went on the road with a carnival and I
shut myself down emotionally. I would hide behind humour and sarcasm and I was
lonely.
I was living, but I wasn’t alive… I
was barely aware. I cross dressed occasionally, but there was always shame and
fear attached. Never the comfort and relaxation and rightness that were once
there and I cried inside. A lost, trapped little girl never allowed to be me because
of fear. I grew older and I tried to be who my family thought I was. I tried to
be a guy and have relationships, but my partners always sensed something wrong
or off about me and would leave. I dated someone who was more masculine than I
was, though I didn’t realize it at the time, but she sensed the ‘weakness’ in
me and became abusive, both mentally and physically and I retreated further
into myself.
After this I spiraled further into
depression and finally had a breakdown. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t go out, and
all I could do was stay in bed and try to escape my thoughts. I would have died
I think, but I was responsible for more than myself. I had cats, and I was
afraid of hurting my family, so I suffered. And I hated. I hated everyone and
everything, especially him, especially me. But I lived.
In June 2002, I had a breakthrough…
I let go of my hate and fear for a moment and saw the me I had buried. In my
journal of the time I wrote “Shit! I’m a woman!” I couldn’t rebury me, he
started to weaken. I told my therapist, I told my friends, I told my family….
They all seemed to already know. My fear of society, my fear of my family
reactions, all that had kept me in the darkness and made me miserable… it was
me…
Nothing brought this more to my
attention than two phone calls last Wednesday afternoon. One was from my eldest
sister who is a Pentecostal churchgoer and a bit of a fundamentalist. This
sister once told me I was under some sort of demonic curse. However, on
Wednesday, when I told her that I was going forward with my transition, she
told me that it seemed to be doing me good and I was more emotionally present.
Not what I expected.
The second call was from my father and it was because I
set a fuse alight a few months ago when I cancelled my old Facebook account. He
surprised me by asking why I had cancelled it as he had only just now got the
message. I was shocked into direct truth and told him everything, about being
referred to CAMH (the Center for Addiction and Mental Health) for its gender clinic, about my name change and together we had a big emotional
event with him starting to accept me, and me having a big ugly cry (which I
needed). Fear had kept me from coming clean and maybe learning to be my fathers
daughter.
At one time the fear may have been
justified, but that changed while I kept myself locked away, and I lost over 30
years of my life. I still struggled over the last ten years fighting him,
fighting the fears but I am starting to allow myself freedom from fear. I am
allowing myself to move forward and I am allowing myself to be Diana Michelle
Howe.
