I wrote probably too many essays on this general topic in the early days. Words work only so far on this subject.
Heck if I know. But I realio trulio believe I am female. How do I know? How do you know?
Go to a warm, quiet, dark room. Sit down. Let your body go limp. Look around your mind. What's it like in there? Can you tell if you are a woman or a man, with no recourse to your body?
Try a thought experiment. Could anything that anyone could do to you change you into the opposite of what you are now? If the galaxy's finest team of surgeons moved your brain to a body of the other sex, would it feel right? Could you be happy there? Would you still want to behave the way you do now, the way you feel, or would you change your behavior to fit your new body?
You are in an automobile accident and loose all feeling and use of your body from the neck down. Would you still have an identity as a man or a woman? Would that identity still be important to you?
And when you're dead. When it can't possibly make any practical difference to anyone. Does it matter to you how you are remembered, as woman or man?
So why do you think it is right to point at my body, laugh your embarrassed shallow laughs, and tell me I am not what I know I am?
Huh? What?
I am transsexual. I was identified at birth as one gender, learned at a very early age to shut up about not feeling comfortable in the role expected of me, and suffered for too many years in a very uncomfortable acting job. Eventually I realized that it would be best for all concerned (me, my family, and the members of my village) to just be myself. This I have done, and it has freed an enormous amount of my energy, which I am reinvesting in my community.
I say I am posttranssexual because I do not claim to have been, to now be, or to desire to become either of the two genders commonly available on store shelves. I was not an 'A' trapped in a 'B' body, I'm a 'C'. That most people now see me as a woman says something, but I am not certain what. Part of what it says is that our society forces on people one label or the other, and so a person who does not fit in bin 'M' must be placed in bin 'F'. I believe that either there should be quite a few more bins, with the current determination of bin left up to the individual, or that the bins should be done away with altogether.
I am simply me. Either take me as you find me, or leave me alone. I am a very nice, easy going person, but I will not conform to your idea of what I should be. I know what I should be, and I am busy being myself. (Which is damned difficult in this society of conformist look-a-likes! :-)
Not! My life is quite exciting, but not because I am queer or have 'had a sex change.' My life is exciting because I have two wonderful children and some great friends and I am involved in all kinds of things I find meaningful and fun and rewarding. My lifestyle would be more accurately described as: woman with two kids, busy and active in her community, and she has a job, too!
For you political correctness hounds, I am not truly lesbian (not a womyn born womyn), I am not truly transsexual (because I don't believe that genital appearance determines one's gender), and like Kate Bornstein, I don't even go so far as to claim I am a woman: "I know I'm not a man—about that much I'm very clear, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people's rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other—a world that doesn't bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is." Gender Outlaw, 1994.
At birth I was labeled 'male,' but I never believed it. I always knew that I was something else. The only 'else' presented by our society is 'female,' which to a large extent I am. But that does not make me 'woman' now any more than I was 'man' then. I am 'other.' What I have done is to stop pretending and lying. I freed myself from the crushing burden of playing a role instead of being who I truly am. (Hey, lookit me! I'm self-actualized!)
I am happier now than I ever believed possible. I never realized before my liberation what it meant to be happy. I know that sounds sappy, but for the first time in my life I am a fully functional adult who enjoys life and looks forward to each new day. That's terrific!
Not that this is easy. Although I 'pass,' I in general choose to not do so. As a consequence I am often pre-judged, sometimes feared or hated, and generally misunderstood. So I just work on being me, and most folks eventually get to the point where I am just Lisa, not 'Lisa the transsexual' or 'Lisa the queer.' And that's fine, that's all I want.
I am a co-parent in a relationship of eighteen years. (My spouse and I are a legally married same-sex couple. So there, U.S. Congress!) I have family who are loving and accepting and supportive (and some who aren't, mais c'est la vie). I have friends, old and new. I have a demanding job. I write and get published. I am active in my community. I say, "Hi," to my neighbors, pay my bills on time, and I am nice to animals.
I thank God every day for giving me the grace to do what I had to do, to stop hurting the people around me, to be what I could be, to accept the joy of life. My trust in God (who I believe has no simple gender) has been reflected in the wonderful help and acceptance I have received from so many people in my life.
I was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1957, where I stayed in the same house until I moved out on my own in 1971. I have a brother two years my junior, and very few living relatives. I bounced back and forth between public (Paul Revere, Edison, Memorial) and private (Holland Hall) schools. I played with the kids in my neighborhood until about junior high, then I became a loner and a recluse, reading hundreds of books each year. My family was starkly dysfunctional. My transsexual feelings did not make childhood any easier.
As a child I was interested in science and electronics. I read widely, including a lot of science fiction. I did a lot of camping and was heavily into model rocketry. I had no true friends, not being able to confess my inner self. I attracted unusual people. I tried to be invisible in school, but I got beat up and harassed far too much. I hated physical education classes with a passion I cannot begin to describe. In retrospect I think I was only tenuously sane during some of those years.
Though I graduated high school with a D+ grade average I got into a private college because I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and my psychologist was an alumnus of Westminster College and wrote me a letter. In college I actually did a decent job and graduated with a B.A. in philosophy and a B grade average. I became interested in computers and took a bunch of independent study courses. I actually ran the College data processing operation for a year.
I didn't get into a graduate program in philosophy, so I took the easy way out and went to the state university in computer science. I did academically okay at the University of Missouri at Rolla, but again I didn't really fit in. I worked briefly for NCR in Wichita, then bailed out to join the staff of Creative Computing magazine in New Jersey. From there I went to The University of Michigan at Flint to teach computer science for three years, then to Ann Arbor, then to East Lansing. I've lived I think 17 places and had about that many jobs.
I like pizza, Reuben sandwiches, Classic Coke, Dr. Pepper, salads, just about anything with pasta, tomatoes, and cheese; coffee, tea, me, and tuna fish. Breakfast is often bagels and cream cheese. Lunch is often a tuna sub. Dinner is often pizza in one of its many forms (I mean, lasagna is just pizza with big floppy noodles instead of a crust, right?). I eat a lot, but as long as I keep walking, it doesn't make me fat. But if I take a few weeks off in the middle of the winter and hole up, I notice my jeans begin to shrink. I do not have a sweet tooth, and would never buy candy on my own initiative.
I'm mildly dyslexic, not enough to interfere with reading, but enough so I never could spell worth a darn, always confused left and right, couldn't reliably sight read music, and I bailed out of math when I got to calculus because I kept doing things backwards or sideways. I was diagnosed in 1992 with carpal tunnel syndrome (a repetitive stress injury). After some physical therapy and modification of work habits I'm keeping it from getting worse, but it is a specter that haunts my thoughts of old age. I write constantly. Not being able to use a keyboard some day is not a pleasant thought.
Around 1981 I gave my drivers license back to the state (in exchange for a personal ID card) and have not driven a motor vehicle since sometime in the seventies. I walk (at least 20 miles a week all year long) and use a little mass transit. This saves me an enormous amount of money and aggravation. But I see the world through the eyes of a pedestrian and I do not consider more streets, more cars, and more car parks to be a blessing, much the contrary! Perhaps once the automobile represented freedom. I feel it now is simply another of the shackles that bind people to lives of toil and misery.
I listen to music when I can, and I don't mean in the background. I turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and get lost in the music. I listen to a wide variety because what I look for is an interweaving of melody, mood, the voice as an instrument, and a message (verbal or not). My own mood influences what I listen to, which goes from extreme (Dead Kennedys) to extreme (Bach). A lot of folk, a lot of jazz, and a sprinkling of other stuff. Recent favorites are Dar Williams, October Project, Jane Siberry, Billy Bragg, Suzanne Vega, The The, Peter Schilling, Johnny Clegg, Concrete Blond, and lots of 'womens music.' Over time the list has included The Moody Blues, J.D. Blackfoot, Keith Jarett, Simon and Garfunkel, Bowie, Holly Near, Hawkwind, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Pete Seger, John Denver, Renaissance, and I was a big Beach Boys fan. (But not The Beatles when they were first popular, for some reason.)
I love being a parent. Not that it is always fun, or easy. But a more important and rewarding task I cannot conceive. I particularly like reading to my daughter. She has a mind like a thirsty sponge and reads and listens to fill it. At only six and a half years old she can read a couple of juvenile or young adult books a day. (We do not watch television and did not have a set for her first six years.) My son is an action-oriented guy who doesn't sit still for extended reading. He wants to experience the world rather than hear about it. So he's always covered with bruises from his encounters with the world's rough corners.
I don't need an alarm clock. My internal clock can wake me when I want to get up, which is often five in the morning. I like to walk to work before the cars are out. I love wide open spaces in the absence of cars and crowds. The sounds, the colors, the smells. My family camped on the Texas beaches in the fifties and sixties, before they became popular. We'd go down for a week at Thanksgiving and see no other human beings except for an occasional Coast Guard helicopter. That was wonderful. Walking back in the dunes, the horizon framed by tall grass, as if I were the only person on the planet.
My father did not like to fly and so used the train for all his business trips. In the fifties and sixties I went all over the country by train. Twice to California, several times to the east coast states, and many times to Chicago. We also car-camped all over the country, before it was popular. I remember driving into Grand Canyon or Mesa Verde at dusk in the summer and finding a choice of camping spots. I remember when there was no traffic on the highways at night. I remember when campers did not lock their belongings away and could go off for a day in confidence that someone at the campsite would close up the tent if it rained. Why is it all so different now?
I haven't been to a movie in many years, but ones I have liked include: Paint Your Wagon, Repo Man, Liana, Wizards, All the Presidents Men, and of course the Monty Python movies (and I am a fan of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Firesign Theatre). I never watched a lot of television, but I did like early sixties spy shows (I absolutely adore The Prisoner), Star Trek, and some of the short-lived shows I now cannot remember. (What was the one in the early sixties about the guy on a motorcycle who ended up in a different morally sticky situation each week? [A reader told me the series was Then Came Bronson—-thanks!] And the eighties one with the Aussie punk and the truck that had a built-in helicopter?) And the original Avengers and of course Max Headroom. I liked MTV in its early years, too.
My recreational reading includes a lot of science fiction, though I don't like all the negative stuff that has predominated the last decade or so; Marion Zimmer Bradley, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Samuel Delany, Suzette Elgin, Zenna Henderson, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Fritz Leiber, Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Joanna Russ, Helen Wright. Mystery: Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton. Poetry, lots. (For six years I've spent at least one and usually two hours a day reading to my children. If I ever see another Boxcar Children book, I'm gonna puke. But to my daughter I can read L'Engle and even books such as Alexi Panshin's Rite of Passage, so I've survived. The first few Oz books were good. The last ten or so, well, enough!) And I read much too much lesbian, feminist, transsexual stuff. I'm sick to death of anything having to do with computers.
I'm sitting as I write this at my 40mhz 386dx running Linux. I have about 40 square feet of the rear bedroom curtained off as my workspace. It is quite cluttered with books, CDs, a bulletin board, children's' drawings, and such. Just room for me to get to my chair and sit down. I'm listening to Dar William's wonderful song, "When I Was A Boy." (I actually do not like clutter, which drives me a little crazy in this house where no expanse of wall is without an item of furniture, no shelf is unfilled, no counter surface uncluttered.)
One noisy person can banish the silence of a hundred contemplative people. One cluttered person can fill the space of a hundred uncluttered people. One person can turn solitude from a place of worship to a prison. One vandal can destroy a building or a park. Is this what has happened to us? Is entropy to triumph so soon?