GenderBendy

Welcome!

Hello! My name is Lisa. Actually, legally, it's Elizabeth Hillary Bunker, but that's for business and formal. Lisa is who I *am*. In November 2008 (having presented as male all my life) I wrote to my own surprise in my journal: "I just want to be a girl." Now I am living full-time as a woman. My purpose in writing this blog is to document my ongoing gender metamorphosis, and to try to increase the world's understanding of the trans experience. Thank you so much for reading!  :-)

On being called "it"

A few weeks ago, at a posh chess club in downtown San Francisco (I look for the local club when I travel), someone called me "it." I had stopped in during their afternoon open access time and was playing a series of casual games with a pleasant young man named Sammy. The first two games had gone to me and I was doing well in the third, when the guy who was playing at the next board glanced over at our position and said, "Oh, is it winning again?"

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Two or three fragmentary ideas for responses flitted through my mind, but all I did was say "she" under my breath, too quietly to hear. Then I sat there numbly hurting and wondering what to do. Should I walk out? Confront him? Lodge a complaint? Burst into tears? What?

Then I remembered something I had heard a few weeks before on the program Democracy Now!. Host Amy Goodman was interviewing a woman who had done something to rile her local right-wingers, and as a result she was receiving a lot of abuse - e-mails, phone calls, even death threats. At the end of the interview Amy asked the woman, "Do you have anything you want to say to your adversaries?" and she answered calmly, "I wish them well."

I admired that response. So what I did at the chess club was, I waited until it-man had just finished a game, and then I held out my hand to him and said, "Hi, I'm Lisa." What else could he do? He shook my hand and said his name. Then I went back to playing chess with Sammy, and that was that.

Another time I might confront, might express my hurt and anger, might try to educate. In the meantime I am glad that I have found a way that seems to work, at least for now, to hold myself together when subjected to random unexpected nastiness.

My word-geek brain has come up with the following:

Letter-Ladder Poem for a Trans Woman

When you are  T

They will call you  IT

And you will be  HIT

With all sorts of other  SHIT

But though it hurts when a person  IS HIT

You don't have to accept the hate unless you  WISH IT

So, fuck 'em, and honey, whatever you've got to swish,  SWISH IT!

Sistah, get up here!

Last Thursday, May 30th, was a momentous down-and-up day for me. I was in San Francisco at the annual conference put on by the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. In the morning I learned that I had not gotten a station manager job for which I had been a finalist. The rejection stung, because I thought I was particularly well suited for the job, and had given the candidacy my all. I didn’t have much time to brood about it, though, because in the evening I went to a Moth Story Slam on the theme of neighborhoods, told the story of coming out to my neighbors, and won the slam.

Another part of my California trip was getting together with Larry, whom I hadn’t seen since college. He’s a professional jazz pianist, and when I timorously asked him if he would let me try singing with him he said yes, and then after the first song he said, “let’s do another.” And another, and another, and at the end he didn’t say I was the next Carmen McRae, but he didn’t say I sucked either. He said I hadn’t done too badly for the first time. As horribly self-conscious and unsure about my voice as I have been since transitioning, the implication that he thought there could be a next time made me feel wonderful. Thanks Larry, you’re such a sweetheart. :-)

So in the same few days I received a couple of powerful affirmations of my voice (variously defined), and a couple of de-affirmations of my hireability as a community radio station manager - the natural next step for me if I'm going to stay in the biz. (Besides the job I didn’t get, there was also a conversation with the outgoing holder of another juicy position in which she gently discouraged me from applying.) As a result of these developments, after nearly three decades working in non-commercial radio I find myself wondering if there is still a career arc for me in that world any more.

I was naive about prejudice before I transitioned. I thought it was always clear-cut and obvious. It’s not. It’s insidious and veiled. In this case I can all too easily imagine even such dedicated liberals as the folks who were considering my application reassuring themselves that they had no problem with my transness themselves, but still fretting about how, for example, potential funders might be reluctant to give money to a station I was running because a trans woman was the one asking, and so finding some plausible reason not to hire me.

Of course I’ll never know for sure if such prejudice by proxy was in play. Maybe it was plain straight-ahead prejudice. Maybe on the other hand I just wasn't good enough for the job. Maybe it doesn't matter. Here's what I know: if after a lifetime of work in my chosen field it turns out that I can’t move ahead, maybe it’s time to go into another field. Suddenly it seems more important to finish the novel I wrote the draft of last November during NaNoWriMo. Likewise to get back into the comedy work; likewise to find some place local to do some more singing; likewise to really engage with the idea of putting together a one-woman show.

High risk ventures? Yep. Long odds of success? Uh-huh. Buffeted by fluctuating confidence, scared of failure? You bet. Might still have to just go for it, though. What the hell else am I going to do? Money worries press ever harder, other avenues seem closed, and there are only so many hours in a day, so much energy left in the body. Life surely does seem to want to boot me out into the spotlight.

One more email to the Plain Dealer about Cemia Dove

Dear Ted [Diadiun, Cleveland Plain Dealer Reader Representative],

One more thought with regard to the PD's coverage of Cemia Dove. At least one other news service is getting right:

Connor Kiesel's report

I refer to the short printed article, not the accompanying video.

OK, I've said my piece, and will pester you no further. I hope I've helped you see trans people not as freaks, jokes, crazies, or villains, but as people simply trying to live authentic lives after having been dealt a tough genetic hand at birth. It's hard having a body out of synch with who you know yourself to be, even before you encounter the world's prejudice, ignorance, and fear.

Regards,

~Lisa~

The Plain Dealer just can't get it right about Cemia Dove

I have been following the The Cleveland Plain Dealer's coverage of the murder of trans girl Cemia Dove with increasing dismay. The transadvocate has a good in-depth analysis of the original coverage here. A PD article yesterday, reporting an arrest in the case, which continues to mis-gender Ms. Dove and deny her any name but her birth name is here (update - as of 4p ET on 5/5/13, this article has apparently been taken off the PD website). And a column today by PD reader representative Ted Diadiun is here.

Here is the e-mail I have just sent to Mr. Diadiun:

Dear Mr. Diadiun,

I have just read both Mark Holan's 5/4 article on an arrest in the Cemia Dove case and your column today about the PD's coverage of Ms. Dove's murder. I am sorry that some of the response the paper got to its coverage was vitriolic - there's never any call for that. On the other hand, I feel compelled to suggest, in a most respectful way, that everyone at the PD involved in this coverage still just doesn't get it. 

I am once again appalled, as I was when I saw the original and edited versions of the articles about the discovery of Ms. Dove's body, that the paper continues to use only her male birth name. True, it is probably still her legal name - I doubt she had enough privilege or support in her life to change it - but it only took me a couple of minutes of internet searching, based on the information in the first versions of the story in your paper, to find a couple of other names she clearly preferred. Even if you felt compelled to mention her birth name, you could have mentioned her female name(s) too - in the great majority of the article, ideally.

I am also deeply saddened that you re-used the same awful photos from the original coverage. Again, a few minutes on the internet would have led your reporter to Ms. Dove's facebook presence or to her youtube channel, where you would have found plenty of kinder pictures. The pictures you persist in using rob her of her dignity, or worse - they make her a laughingstock.

And, although you even say in your column how the pronoun issue could be resolved in future by setting up the use of "she" with an explanatory note, you don't do this yourself. Avoiding pronouns altogether, as you do in your column, ducks the issue and is not an adequate response to the problems in your coverage.

The simple truth of the transgender experience is that people are the gender they say they are, period. Until your coverage, and your coverage of your coverage, of the murder of Cemia Dove acknowledges the truth that she was a female person, you continue to tacitly condone and perpetuate the prejudice which led to this horrific crime against a disenfranchised and helpless girl.

Please, dig deeper. Do some more research. Question your prejudices. Try harder to understand. Because, so far, up to and including your column, The PD's coverage of this tragic story is truly shameful. 

Respectfully,

~Lisa~

p.s., send the same evening:

Hello again. Upon reflection, and having calmed down a bit, I'd like to tone down a few words and phrases in my last few paragraphs:

Until your coverage, and your coverage of your coverage, of the murder of Cemia Dove acknowledges the truth that she was a female person, you continue to tacitly condone and perpetuate the same sorts of prejudice which no doubt contributed to this horrific crime.

Please, dig deeper. Do some more research. Question your assumptions. Try harder to understand. I have already asked the same of your reporter and editors. Ms. Dove was evidently murdered simply for trying to be who she was. The least you can do in your coverage is afford her some of the basic dignity and respect in death that she was denied in life. 

~L~

 

That lady moving on the face

Today during a walk on Mackworth Island I overtook a grandfatherly-looking man pushing a toddler in a stroller. They were walking the same direction I was but had stopped to look at something. The kid was probably two, just old enough to start narrating the world. I waved and smiled, and the kid said "That lady is walking." Then as I continued on they followed me and the kid kept talking about me, each time starting with "That lady..."

My goodness, don't we start young gendering each other. But on the other hand, how satisfying to be instantly and correctly gendered by such a guileless morsel of humanity.

Moments like this notwithstanding, last week I engaged seriously for the the first time with the possibility of facial feminization surgery. I don't mean that I've decided to do it, just that I've started deciding whether to do it. Specifically, I have hired a professional photographer to take six pictures of my face according to the exact specifications of a person in England who does virtual FFS with Photoshop. This person has taken great pains to learn exactly what is possible, so the pics I get back will give me a detailed and realistic idea of what I might be able to accomplish.

I haven't moved on the face before because I am afraid of how hard those pics might set me aching again, but with SRS successfully accomplished I guess I'm ready to take that chance. Sweet friends tell me I'm beautiful, and I'm passing passing passing, but I can still see man-face in the mirror, and I hate it. Regardless of what anyone else says or thinks, I have made myself a simple promise: after the long hard gender-road I've travelled, if I decide I really want this, I get to have it. 

If I decide to move ahead it will mean surgeon-research, deciding what combination of procedures to have done, and wrestling with the money issue. Could be some years off still, or could happen quickly, depending on circumstances.

I'll post the pics when I get them - early June maybe. Until then that lady will be counting the days, trying not to check her e-mail too absurdly often, and bracing for the possibility of a further bout of severe dysphoria. Que sera sera. 

Leveraging disconcerting otherness

If I don't hear back from this one job I really thought I was qualified for by the end of today, I'm going to have to assume I didn't even make it to the phone interview stage. I guess I should have refrained from mentioning my transness on my resume. Of course they'll have some other good reason if/when they turn me down, and I'll never know if it's prejudice or not. Ha. Welcome to life as the disconcerting other.

The femme ache is back. Yesterday I went on an unpremeditated shopping spree for makeup, and after a winter of drab sameness got dolled up for an evening of eight ball at Mulligan's. I've gotten dolled up again this morning, and just held an impromptu photo shoot at my desk to check my look. I'm going for cute, and, I don't know, maybe approaching it sometimes, but what I seem naturally to be able to nail is goofy. Of the five pics below the fourth felt best taking it, and made me squirm least looking at them after. It made me laugh instead.

So, since nobody seems to be want to hire me, I'm back to thinking about comedy as the next thing into which to pour my energy. I'm planning to perform twice in the next few days: Sunday at the open mic at Mama's CrowBar and Monday at Taffy's outrageousness-during-the-commercials-in-RuPaul show at Styxx. Time to tap the deep untapped wells of goofiness which have always been here inside me. Fate commands it!

 

Job hunting, and a night on the town

I haven’t posted much since the surgery because I have a willful literal part of my brain which tries to make something so because something else is so, as in, I’ve had the surgery, so I'm not trans any more - I’m just another ordinary woman now, dammit. These kinds of simplistic formulations can help with motivation and focus, but they don’t turn out to be exactly true, which leads to stress. The trans thing just keeps coming up again.

For example, I’m job hunting. I like my current job, but after eleven years I itch for a new challenge. Also, as a practical matter, I need to start making a little more money if I can. So the question is, do I mention that I am trans in my applications?

It shouldn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. There is definitely a lot of transphobia in the world, and in my experience even many enlightened liberal folks still have some work to do to get comfortable with a trans person. On the other hand, bringing the trans thing up early might actually make me a more attractive candidate for some positions. A trans woman might trump a cis woman in some people’s diversity tallies.

So far I have mentioned it (with a brief factual note at the head of my resume - experience before 2011 under the name...), because I did a lot of the stuff on my resume under my old male name, and I figure they might go looking online for, say, those articles I wrote back in the early 00’s. I might stop mentioning it though, if none of my current apps pan out, so they can think about me first, at least for a little while, as just as a woman who’s interested in their job.

It feels icky, having to calculate the when-to-tell issue, but I can't avoid it.

Then there’s dating, which so far just isn’t happening. I got feeling so antsy and fun-starved this week that I messaged Taffy, my dear outrageous drag queen friend, and arranged to share a night on the town. I wanted to get drunk, play pool, dance ecstatically, flirt, and maybe even kiss someone.

Which all happened except I didn’t kiss anyone, though someone did kiss me. I got drunk and played pool at Blackstones, and flirted with a guy at the table. In our short conversation just before Taffy and I left I saw and took an opening to include in a list of pert questions “So do you like guys?” which he answered with a careful “For the most part.” He was handsome, nearly as tall as me, and seemed quiet and kind. Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

On to Styxx, to dance ecstatically with a bunch of sweat-sheened twentysomethings. At some point I opened my eyes and a cute femme woman was dancing with me. We smiled at each other, and I enjoyed watching her dance - yep, I still like girl-bodies, especially the round softnesses. After a couple minutes she shouted something I couldn’t hear, pecked me on the cheek, and disappeared into the crowd. Later I found her on the floor again and we exchanged names. She excused herself with “I’m going to go get a drink, but I’ll find you later,” and I didn’t see her again, though I did look. Gentle brush-off? Doesn’t matter...she kissed me! :-) Hm, maybe we’ll bump into each other again.

The part I didn’t plan for was resting by the subwoofers with Taffy, our whole bodies vibrating to the pounding of the beat, and suddenly bursting into tears. Taffy held me while I cried and didn’t ask why. Such a good friend.

It’s thrilling out here in the light, and slowly I am becoming more accustomed to the feeling of constant emotional peril. The old sense of myself as a monster unfit to live among humans still intrudes from time to time, but I’m learning to weather those episodes. I guess I’m getting better at really being alive. Yay me. :-)

Doing standup again

Before last night I had done two standup comedy sets in my life, both in late 2011. I killed at the Femme Show in front of an audience of twenty-something queers, and then a few weeks later bombed at the straight peoples' open mike at Slainte. After that debacle it has taken me until now to get my nerve back up to try again, but last night at Mama's Crow Bar on Congress, at their regular Sunday open mike, I did a 9-minute set and got some solid laughs and some nice compliments from other comics after. There were only about 18 people in the room, but still.

I recorded it and am pretty pleased overall. The PA was turned down lower than I wanted and when I have to project my voice drops, so I don't like how masculine I sounded, and the final story needs to be tightened, but mostly the material worked. I started and ended with non-trans humor, because I never want to be just about that, and the main idea of the trans-themed part was seeing if I could figure out how to let the audience know that it was OK to laugh. That worked too.

The best part, though, was that for the first time I got at least a taste of the comfort on stage I've been trying to find since I started dreaming about doing this. Yeah, I'm an introvert, but it turns out I love performing. I'll be going back, because it was a total rush.  :-)

 

The audio

 

Almost had a date

[NOTE: I've rewritten this several times, paring down the self-pity each time until now there's none left. Yay for me. :-)]

A month or so back I dropped in on my OKCupid profile after months away, and while I was there a text box popped up. “Walt” wanted to chat. He had sent me a message some time before but it looked generic, so I hadn’t answered. I felt flattered that he was interested enough to try again, and we had a pleasant text-exchange. Further chats and messages followed.

Walt seemed nice - engaging, funny, full of compliments. There was this thing where if he didn’t want to answer a question he just ignored it, but whatever. He wanted to meet. We arranged drinks at the Great Lost Bear. The day of, he postponed. We were communicating about a second try, and then all of a sudden I stopped hearing from him.

The cutoff came after I left him a voice mail message for the first time, and I still often sound male to people on the phone, so was that why? Anyway, I spent a few days compulsively checking my messages, then weathered a day of feeling worthless and unloveable, and then it was past.

I never outright asked Walt if he understood that I’m trans, but I figured he knew because he said he had read my whole profile. Also it turned out he had just finished working at USM, so it seemed unlikely he had missed my recent public transition. Plus he said he had seen me a few times and liked what he saw.

The more I think about love, the less it seems to me to have anything to do with gender. I’m looking for a sympatico someone who might be interested in a mutual opening-toward. There’s no gender in that. As for bodies, well, what matters most to me is cuddling, and everybody has warm skin. Beyond that, if my someone wants sex, I have hardly any libido myself, but I’m comfy in my own body finally, and willing to go along with whatever.

That theory espoused, I will admit to ongoing curiousity about the possibility of a male-bodied lover. I mean, it would be a shame to never try out the new parts, right? Evidently, though, I'm not open to something casual, so...hm. Lisa the enigmasexual.

Hey Walt, no hard feelings, but you could at least have sent a last “Sorry not interested after all” message, y’know? You had me hoping, and then you left me hanging.

I never even met the guy face to face. Fucking impulsive overeager puppydog heart. No restraint whatsoever.

Four years and counting

No post in ten weeks. Bad blogger! Bad bad blogger!

Yes, I know, I'm so sorry. There can be no excuse, so I won't mention how NaNoWriMo ate my November. Nor will I note that after a point there is so much to tell that one starts feeling overwhelmed. Nor will I bring in my still-evolving ideas about where the fact of being trans fits into my life. No, I won't say any of those things.

I've had an anniversary since my last post. It was just this time of year four years ago that I finally figured out that, my whole life long, I had been getting my gender wrong. I have often quoted a line from the life-changing journal entry I wrote back in November of '08: "I just want to be a girl." It was one of the most curious moments of my life, writing that, because I realized it was true even as the pen moved over the paper. But, it is not actually the first gender-laden sentence on that journal page. A couple of paragraphs before, I wrote this:

What about the writing part? Does that come out of a feminine place in me? Is my inner child a dreamy girl? Could be.

Looking back I see now that my desire to write, which I've had since I learned to read, contributed to my gender self-repression. I remember early on feeling captivated both by the floaty self-sufficient internality of making up stories, and by the idea of being a purely detached observing eye. No wonder I was able to just hang out inside myself for so long.

Speaking of writing, in November I participated in National Novel Writing Month. Along with hundreds of thousands of other people all over the world, I wrote a 50k-word rough draft of a novel in 30 days.

All my life I have had this idea that writing had to be a solitary act, and I failed and failed as a writer. NaNoWriMo was a revelation of communal creativity. I joined a facebook group of other participants in Maine, and we encouraged and challenged each other. We had writing sprints every evening. It was glorious. I finished, and I think I have the beginning of a good saleable book which I will try to sell when I have finished rewriting. I could not have done it without my total stranger writing buddies. Yay for teamwork and community!

On a writing-related note, I'm also planning to do standup again. I had an initial good experience back in summer of 2011 performing in the Femme Show for a boisterous audience of young queers, and then got to experience what it's like to bomb at an open mic for straight people. Bombing was no fun, so I withdrew and regrouped. Now I've worked up an all new routine and am looking around for the right room to try it out in.

I think I might be good at comedy. I had an insight: it's like classical music. You carefully craft your set, practice long hours, tweak and adjust and refine...and then you step up into the light and have one chance to make it seem like you just spontaneously thought of all these jokes. I grasp this intuitively. It feels comfortable and safe to me. So, this could be fun.

BTW, if you're thinking, she just said she's getting all teamworky and communal and now she's talking about being a solo performer...what's up with that? Well, I'll tell you: the big payoff of comedy for me, I project, will not be laughs and applause, but the feeling, when it goes well, of synergy and collaboration with the audience. Comedy (like radio, my life's work) is a conversation, not a performance. Communal, social. So there.

Yes, yes, of course I want to get laughs too. :-p

What else? Oh, yeah, surgery-recovery. Not much to report, which I know must be disappointing to those among my acquaintance who seem so fascinated by the topic. It's going fine. I'm still not orgasmic, but haven't given up hope...though I'm also reconciled to the possibility of never getting that back. And I'm still a revirgin, and may remain so for quite a while, the way dating has been going, which is, it hasn't. A lot of my new comedy routine, actually, is about how uncomfortable I still seem to make most men. "Look," I'm going to say to them, "This is really simple. There's nothing to worry about. Just look at it this way: now that you know I'm trans, if you laugh at any more of my jokes, it *does* mean you're gay." 

Four years gone by, and if I had to sum up I would say, I made the right choices, and it's going well. What then will the fifth year bring? Continued transformation. These days I feel this physically as still more previously undreamed-of unclenching. For example, I have discovered that I can move my legs apart from each other right where the big femur-balls lock into the pelvis-sockets, opening up down there in a way I never have before. I have been clenched so hard my whole life I've been clenching my bones.

Same thing emotionally too. That still feels more perilous, though. Another reason besides being a writer that I repressed for so long was that I got the message early on that nobody wanted who I really was, nor the love I had to offer from within who I really was. I have a lifetime of rejection to overcome. Most days I do feel confident and strong, but deep down the insecurity still throbs, and I still feel tentative and vulnerable as I turn toward the possibility of intimacy. Tra la, here we go - life.

Oh, and the novel? It's a fantasy story for young adults about Felix Yz, a 15-year old boy who, at the age of four, because of a science experiment gone horribly wrong, was fused at the atomic level with a hyper-intelligent fourth dimensional being. The alien, whom they call Zyx, communicates with Felix by using his fingers to type. The novel takes the form of Felix's journal entries in the last few weeks before a risky (and amusingly high-tech) procedure which will either separate them again, or kill them both. It has a couple of trans characters in it, but the fact that they are trans is incidental to the story.

Which matches where I am now in my life. If I'm going to keep writing this blog, which I do want to do, I think I'm going to have to think of it not so much as a blog about being trans, but as a blog by a fascinating exciting creative sexy intensely alive woman who incidentally happens to be trans. 

I can do that. Works for me...aaand, that's my set. I'm Lisa, and you've been a fabulous audience. Good night!