'Passing'

Passing, in our transgender world, is being taken for the gender one feels one is, regardless what messages the, at times contradictory, body may give.

Me - my passing is about 100%.  It's quite amazing. Though even when I thought of myself as a woman with a female body people would often take me for a guy, all my life.  But now, with a slightly changed voice, a different upper body, the clothes, it's really funny, and very enjoyable.

There I am in Istanbul airport; the post-operative compression garment I have (had) to wear with metal hooks sets off the alarms. A security guy steps forward, runs his metal thing over me, then his hands over my upper body, and has no idea.....

Got into all sorts of conversations with guys which I would not have done before, including one with some Turkish chicken farmers about the attributes/assets of the stewardesses. Not very PC, but one can have fun sometimes.

Coming home from Tbilisi, the ground staff, with my female passport and female boarding card (saying 'Mrs') in their hand each time said 'have a good flight, sir'. (Bit of a frightening thought in terms of airline security, really).

I suspect, though that the young guy in Belgium who helped me to find a nice suit, might have noticed a 'lack' when I tried on the rather tightly-fitting trousers....

Feeble excuses!

The Lietuvos Rytas newspaper has two articles on transgender issues today, for reasons best known to myself.

Among the coverage is a short interview with a gynaecologist who I suspect is still choking over his cornflakes. He refuses to treat women who were formerly men (their passports may still be male, only 2 people have so far been able to change their passports in Lithuania). If the passport says it's a guy, he says, how can 'he' visit a gynaecologist.  He further says that if a man becomes a women, she needs female hormones. But, he thinks, if they prescribe female hormones, the patient can then take them to court for serious assault.

Eh?

Why do cocks and bulls come to my mind?

This testosterone....

is just magic stuff, I tell you, pure unadulterated magic!

Whew, the power it gives you! At the weekend I was outrunning everyone, young and old, male and, er, male - no females in sight; powering up and down those ditches, taking all the wrong turns and still overtaking everyone. It was brilliant!

At night, when sleeping on my arm, I feel I am sleeping on Michelin man's pneumatic biceps.

As for the downstairs department - testosterone should be banned for males under the age of 18. Life of its own!

Should have thought of this years ago!

The poor soul

Here's a phone call to emergency services made by a five-year-old whose mum is lying on the floor unconscious, and he is alone with her and his 2-year-old brother.

You can hear his despair and distress as he is trying to get help, and his inability to understand what the operator is saying to him 'is she having a fit', 'move any dangerous object' - what's an 'object' to a five-year-old? My heart goes out to him!

'She's not the man I married'

Not sure what to think about this book. The author, 'Helen Boyd', is a woman married to a guy who is 'trans', as she calls it. When she got to know him, he was a cross-dresser, but now it seems that he wants to live more and more in a female role. She is worried that 'he' will become 'she' one day and she does not know how to handle this.

It seems she has already written a book about him/her - 'My Husband Betty'. But this current book is actually mostly about her self, 'Helen Boyd' (a pseudonym). The additional problem is that for a woman she is actually quite masculine; she was a tomboy as a child, and as an adult she is often seen as a lesbian, what with her dress style and, I suspect, general demeanour. So the roles in the marriage are all over the place; sometimes she is the husband, sometimes he is - but she does not fancy women, hence her concern about the future. Nothing actually happens in the book; she just reviews her childhood and their lives together, and Thinks About Things.

The whole book goes on and on and on about the accepted binary division of society into men and women, what she thinks makes women feminine and men masculine, although all the time she kyboshes stereotypes about typical 'male' or 'female' behaviour. Mostly she complains about being taken for something (ie lesbian) which she is not. To some degree one wonders if the problems could not be solved by some transplants - from him to her and vice versa.

It's quite interesting, reasonably well written, and tries to be a bit scientific/authorative but not the kind of book you could quote in an essay about sexual difference (which I will have to write in the next fortnight or so). It's better than 'misery lit' - but she could have said the same stuff in half the length of the book, or in a few articles. One wonders if it was meant to be a bit of therapy for the author. Those who know nothing about gender theory might find it illuminating (though they might not know that they need illuminating). Not sure that it is totally worth the money I spent on it.

'Sacred Country'

Why did Rose Tremain call her book 'Sacred Country'? What sacred country?

It's a book set in time from 1952 (the death of the King - of England) until more or less the present. A girl grows up in the countryside, but from the age of six identifies as a boy. She grows up in a farmer's family, where her father much prefers her younger brother, who his father wants to take over the farm. There's also another young man, Walter, who does not want to follow the path his family has prepared for him.

So all three are unhappy. The parents of Mary/Martin are not totally delighted themselves; mum keeps drifting in and out of the local mental hospital, and dad takes to drink. And you are expecting a happy end?

The book tells of Mary's/Martin's struggles to be who s/he is. It is only when s/he is 20 (in the 70s) or so that she first hears the word 'transsexual' (a lot earlier than when I heard it!). Finally she begins the treatment....Meanwhile Timmy, her little brother, feels that the land is not the right vocation for him and finds another one. And Walter also looks for his own direction, and eventually finds it.

The greatest of literature the book is not; not exactly at the level of Booker prize winners - not wonderful skills with words, the way some writers have. It's quite interesting, and unusual. Mixes the 'exotic' with the very plain. I wonder if Walter's story was a bit of padding. Does not really get into the minds of transsexuals, or show the distress they suffer while living in a role that the midwife/society has assigned to them; and the section on the treatment is rather poor - makes me wonder how much the writer researched that. And do they really do breast operations like that in the UK? But it might give people who know nothing about these topics a little bit of information.

I think there are better books on this topic - but I suppose it's a start. Very readable, for a longish flight or so.

'She's not the man I married'

Not sure what to think about this book. The author, 'Helen Boyd', is a woman married to a guy who is 'trans', as she calls it. When she got to know him, he was a cross-dresser, but now it seems that he wants to live more and more in a female role. She is worried that 'he' will become 'she' one day and she does not know how to handle this.

It seems she has already written a book about him/her - 'My Husband Betty'. But this current book is actually mostly about her self, 'Helen Boyd' (a pseudonym). The additional problem is that for a woman she is actually quite masculine; she was a tomboy as a child, and as an adult she is often seen as a lesbian, what with her dress style and, I suspect, general demeanour. So the roles in the marriage are all over the place; sometimes she is the husband, sometimes he is - but she does not fancy women, hence her concern about the future. Nothing actually happens in the book; she just reviews her childhood and their lives together, and Thinks About Things.

The whole book goes on and on and on about the accepted binary division of society into men and women, what she thinks makes women feminine and men masculine, although all the time she kyboshes stereotypes about typical 'male' or 'female' behaviour. Mostly she complains about being taken for something (ie lesbian) which she is not. To some degree one wonders if the problems could not be solved by some transplants - from him to her and vice versa.

It's quite interesting, reasonably well written, and tries to be a bit scientific/authorative but not the kind of book you could quote in an essay about sexual difference (which I will have to write in the next fortnight or so). It's better than 'misery lit' - but she could have said the same stuff in half the length of the book, or in a few articles. One wonders if it was meant to be a bit of therapy for the author. Those who know nothing about gender theory might find it illuminating (though they might not know that they need illuminating). Not sure that it is totally worth the money I spent on it.