'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.

Screening is bad for your ... nerves

Don't let anyone tell you that medical screening is good for you; the amount of nerves it must cost for every cancer it actually finds must almost balance out the benefits, quite apart from the cost of unnecessary and sometimes uncomfortable investigations.

There I was, about to begin some long-term treatment, and needing some tests beforehand. I swear that every time someone pointed an xray or an ultrasound at me they found something. Which then needed investigation, amongst others two cancer marker blood tests and a biopsy.

Result? I'm as fit as a fiddle. Just my hair has got greyer over the last few weeks....

You know how it is...

...in those cartoons, where someone cuts off a bit of a leg of a chair, to stop it wobbling, and he cuts it off too short, then starts sawing off bits of the other legs, and before you know it it's a stool....

That's how it was with my own hair cutting just now. I have a dinky little machine that I just run over my head and it had produced pretty good results so far (not that I can really see the back of my head....). And it was working nicely, and I was cutting off bits more and bits more - and suddenly it dug deep - and now I have a patch with very short hair indeed.

Well, I always wanted to see what I look like with extremely short hair (a No 1, roughly speaking). Guess tomorrow I will have a chance to find out. Unfortunately tomorrow is also the day that I might tell my other bit of news to a very good, albeit older, friend of mine - who a year ago, when I was still trying to be a woman, complemented me on my longer hair and (to him) good looks - and tomorrow he'll probably not even recognize this crew-cut person.

New Body!

Looking back, when at the start I gave this blog a name mimicking a feminist health manual, it should have got the prize for the most ironic title of the year.

Recently I discovered that my body and my self are in fact two very disparate items - my body is female, and now I know that my self is male! Now I am working on my body being united with my self.

In some way I probably always knew that, but somehow I had never drawn the relevant conclusions. Looking back (again!) I can see now that my life is just about the classic case of a transsexual.

For complicated family reasons which I won't go into, in childhood I had always tried to be 'a good little girl'; but also always rebelled in a quiet little way. Always played with boys, loved boys' toys, dressed like a boy where I could, could not deal with it when at the age of around 10 my girlfriends began to find boys interesting; growing up into a woman's body was a catastrophe.....I almost failed at school only just scraping through the final exams - but once I left home suddenly education became interesting and satisfying, with the result that in whatever I have studied I have been doing pretty damn well at, regardless whether it was social sciences, systems analysis and statistics, or music.

I nearly always had short hair; even when I had long hair people would take me for a guy; my clothes, while made for women, mostly were unisex and I was often taken for a guy. Particularly in places where I work, like the southern former Soviet Union and Central Asia, where women are feminine and I am not, it was always hard to use female public toilets (I don't do that any more!). And there are other aspects....

Happiness has been kind of a rare companion - I was very happy when my son was born (maybe my body was ok after all?), but thankfully he was a son and not a daughter. I don't know what I would have done had I produced a girl that likes pink! Ye gads! Instead I could now play with the toys that I had never had as a child - the railway track, the race track, and so on.

In the last few years my problem with anger management became more pronounced, and finally I went to get help. It took quite a few sessions with the therapist to find this 'transsexualism' problem - so deeply was it buried! And gee, it was scary at first! How could possibly I live and work(!) as a guy in conservative Eastern Europe?

But I thought I would try it out; first by wearing guy's clothes, and since August presenting as a guy. Luckily I am surrounded mostly by educated people who are all very supportive (you really know who your friends are in a situation like this). Of course there are also some prats but that's life. It's the problem of their little minds, not mine.

And now I hope to start the medical treatment soon - that will be fantastic. It's great to be a guy!

Variations on a theme of toothache

Oh heck!

Wednesday went to the dentist to finish off a little piece of work on a tooth on the right hand side which had got infected three weeks ago. In passing mentioned a little discomfort on the left side.

Dentist took a look and muttered something about a very large filling. Then took another look and realised that this (wisdom) tooth no longer has a friend above, and hence has started to rise up, creating a little pocket between it and the next tooth which caused debris to get stuck there. It has to come out, he told me.

I was aghast! After losing about 5 teeth before I was 25 I had always sworn I would fight for every further tooth! But arguing brought nothing, so out it came - with relative ease. That did not hurt, and it won't hurt later, he told me. I have a feeling he dropped a little silver thing into the hole. Bit surprised that it had only one root, but I see that sometimes the roots fuse.

Ha. 'Tis Saturday morning and I am now finding a good use for the painkilling medication I got after my hernia operation in January, when I did not need it. F*ck's sake. But when yesterday I went to finally finish off the other piece of work the other dentist said that it was healing well, and indeed it looks like it is healing well. But it still frigging hurts; I pray there is no infection.

Tomorrow I am off to Kazahkstan for three days and I'll have to manage the painkilling medication really well to survive flights and conferences etc. Last time I flew to Georgia I had a stinging headache and virtually no access to medication; that was horrific.

I wonder when it will stop hurting??

Smoking damages ....your balcony!

Smoking does not seem to be good for me.....Since starting in June (long story) I've developed an interesting little cough (can't blame the lungs, really), lost a filling from using chewing gum (repair almost completed), ....and last night managed to set my balcony alight!

So...it was a windy day - I hate it when the wind does the smoking for me. I kept the ashtray, as always, in a redundant windowbox filled with compost. Stubbed out all the cigarettes. One had blown out into the peat. No worries.

At 2.30 am I woke up from a dream. A little while later I thought there was a little smell of burning - but this is quite often in my neighbourhood. Strange time of day, all the same. Went to the loo; when I came back I noticed the smell was stronger in the bedroom than elsewhere. Strolled over to the window and opened the curtains.....to be greeted by a dainty row of flames dancing merrily along the front of the balcony.

So I rushed backwards and forwards between bathroom and balcony, and half a dozen buckets later it was out - some bits of the plastic window boxes have poured themselves down the edge of the balcony, another bit is glued to the floor.... Happy days. Given that the balcony overlooks a busy crossroads I thought that someone might have called the fire brigade, but thankfully no. Nor, it would appear, did any neighbours wake up, though the entrance to the casino was nicely marked by rivers of earthy water.

Now imagine the same scenario if I had not gone to bed, but left the country as I sometimes do at night.....