Saturday 2 May 2015

School's in

So, over the last month I have been doing a lot of presentations with our local "Trans Needs Committee" of which I am a member. The odd thing about this month is that the majority of the presentations I have given were to students, ranging from high school students to first and second year medical students and soon-to-be doctors finishing up their last year. The opportunity given to us to talk to these three groups of people is amazing, imagine these things happening even just 5 years go? Well here anyway, all but impossible.

Two years ago, when I started my transition, the general consensus was that as a trans patient you had to go to your doctor with information about you and what it means to be transgender because your doctor, most likely, had no idea. It seems to me that the transgender "movement" has taken Newfoundland, particularly the medical field, by storm and surprise and frankly they were not prepared. It is an odd feeling to go to a doctor and see how completely lost they are on the topic and suddenly become their source of information. On a whole, trans patients were going to doctors for help and ended up being the one doing the helping.

It has changed a fair bit, though it is still somewhat like this. Doctors here now, many of the good ones anyway, have taken it upon themselves to learn more about trans patients. The committee I am on has managed to get several research/practicing doctors to travel here and give seminars, presentations, etc. And I am proud to say all of my personal health care professionals seem to be right on top of learning more and making it to these meetings. The presentations we do on the Trans Needs Committee are still necessary though, we bring the personal needs to the doctors, we are still the voice they come to for information or confirmation of information.

For example, one of the biggest parts of our presentation to any audience is terms, We have two slides that I love watching the reaction in the audience. The first is current conceptions about gender, it shows an umbrella with Male on one side of the handle, an Female on the other. Then, *click* we go to the next slide, the same umbrella and a screen full of terms and you can watch the reaction of the crowd ranging from "OMG!" to "How the hell will I remember all of this?" For perhaps the same effect, here they are:

Femme, Butch, Stud, Drag Queen, Drag King, Cross dresser, Trans, Transgender, Transsexual, Two-spirit, Gender Queer, Gender fluid, Androgynous, Trans woman (male to female), Trans Man (female to male), Intersex, (Kids) Gender Creative, (Kids) Gender Non-conforming, (Kids) Gender Variant.

Oh, and Male and Female.

I must admit, I take a little evil pleasure dumping all of this information with the statement of, "there's a lot more that we just couldn't fit into the time allotted" in the doctors lap and watching them flounder. It's the anti-authority part of me that gives a little squeal of glee.

However, it has a very different effect on younger people. Instead of being concerned they will mess up what they just learned, younger people tend to just absorb it. To them it's a stream of information that does little else then give them the language to have something to think about. That may not sound important but it seems to be a trick of the mind that you can't properly think of something until you have a word for that something. So simply giving them the language to use is actually a powerful step. Particularly to any young person that is also transgender. Take it from me, just having a word to make sense of your feelings is incredibly liberating.

To be honest though, these presentations have been just as enlightening to me as my audience. Some of these presentations I go to kinda as an "extra". The presentation was done by someone who has a little more experience in it and I am there for the "realness/lived experience" of it. For example, the last three I did was about trans kids, specifically. I, do not have a trans kid, but I was one.

So these presentations, the audience themselves and other trans people, have started to teach me more about me. I have come to realize I have a serious "black hole" in my memory about my gender experience as a child. Perhaps a black hole isn't the correct description because all of it lingers just under the surface and I can see shimmering visions of what they are but unable to grasp them. What happens is a story is told, or a question asked, or information given that makes me think "holy fuck, that was ME". Sometimes that gives me courage, affirmation, and new knowledge about myself. Other times is turns me into a heap of tears on the floor.

For example, I was talking to another trans person about their past, a trans-man. One of the things they said was that before they transitioned many people would, innocently, call him a man. (just so you aren't confused, at the time he would have been presenting female). He realized that this was people just picking up on the little things that make you think "man" or "woman" without really thinking about it, not them trying to be offensive. This blew my mind when I heard it. I have often spoken of how I used to have long hair, and that people used to call me a girl. I never once saw that as a "precursor" of who I was. At the time, I assumed it was for no other reason than my hair. But reflecting back on it, I can't even count the number of times I was "mistaken" as a girl to only be profusely apologized to by the other person, especially store clerks, waiters, service staff, etc. They were not being intentionally provocative or insulting, they made an honest mistake. They were seeing the many subtle things about me that gave off "girl" that even I had no idea about at the time or rather, that I was repressing. What makes this worse is why I assumed these strangers were intentionally insulting me. I assumed that because all of my friends and family insulted me in the same way. I just figured these strangers were getting in on the joke.

I have come face to face with the emotional and social pretzeling I have done to myself. The amount of mental energy I poured into making this all make comfortable sense to me is staggering. I have always remembered explaining away my desires by telling myself that gender is obviously a failed social construct and it was ok to be like I was even though I was a "boy". I remember doing that because I did it all my life, up until about 2.5 years ago. Again, I never once seen what I was doing for what it truly was. I was trying to make my painfully difficult "female side" some how fit with this pervasive idea that I was a boy. The truth being, I was transgender and didn't believe it, didn't accept it, and told myself all of my life that there is something wrong with me that I need to correct.

Can any of you imagine what it is like to police your own thoughts? It came to the point that nothing was more valuable to me then time to think. Friends, family, hobbies, work, money, life in general were all very distant seconds to thinking, trying to sort out my own thoughts. You can guess what problems that has caused, not the least of which is ruined relationships, be them romantic or platonic.

Of course, learning these things about me and my past has hit me in many ways, and I think it's clear to see it hasn't all been roses, but I do see the silver lining in this cloud. I'm trying let these things show me how strong I must have been while being so confused. How resilient I was while being a victim of stigma. And how I can look at myself now as rising from the ruins of the past war in my head. I look back on my past, emotionally and intellectually and that is what I see. I see the remnants of a war with all of the associated feelings that go with it. The obvious lack of understanding, the unnecessary use of force, and ultimately the utter destruction of most of what is good while what is evil seems to run rampant. I look back on it with a mix of feelings. Like any conflict I can't help but think of how senseless it really was. How if I had even an ounce of understanding that war could have been prevented. And how that being on the "beaten" side, I did everything I could to save myself, not all of it makes as much sense on reflection as it did at the time.

The other side to this that I am now grateful for is the tools and the drive it gives me to make sure this happens to as few trans kids/teen as possible, hopefully none. My first presentation to a high school made my mind explode with things I wanted to say, barely any of it to the audience, I wanted to pull the trans kids aside and tell them everything will be ok and just how far along they already are simply for living in this year rather than a year 20-30+ years ago.

So to any younger trans peeps out there that may read this: "You got this."