Jay Sennett's Blog, page 6

Strange Bathroom Logic of Transgender Opponents

I’m not sure transgender and transsexual opponents of our equal rights really understand their own bathroom argument.

Carried to its logical conclusion, watch the video to find out what they expect of transsexual female to male men like me.

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The Secret to What is Underneath (Transphobic) Shame

Post storm clouds shot at Washtenaw Community College. Shot with a Canon 60D.

Several years ago I had Ms. H. read the then latest draft of my memoir.  What more might she want, I had asked.

More Joy

“I think you need more joy.”

Her answer didn’t surprise me as I knew what she would say. I, too, have wanted to write about the joys of transitioning and living as a transsexual man.

But when I imagined how the words will fit on the page, how I could best describe this joy, a part of said, “Everyone will feel sorry for a guy without a penis.”

I seemed to have constructed a transsexual narrative in which I found the whole thing very hard and difficult and not anything I would ever recommend to anyone.

Why did you do this then seems like a reasonable question. Why do anything so painful and shame-filled seems like another good question.

The only answer I could give: Because I needed and wanted to. I still want to, every day I rub the testosterone into my skin. I still want to.

Internalized Transphobia = Shame

This wanting hasn’t had much joy.  After years of deliberation – having a pervasive and all-consuming brood, actually – I have, until recently, possessed a pervasive and all-consuming sense of internalized transphobia.

That’s just a fancy way of saying my body makes me feel ashamed and makes me feel like there is something wrong with me.

My sense of intense shame at being a transsexual has made me a lifelong devotee of self-remorse and personal contempt. (Hello, internalized transphobia!)

I hated my body as a female, despised menstruation and couldn’t wait to become a man.

As a man, I thought all would be well, except then I hated myself and my body. I  didn’t, and don’t, have a penis. (Entre nous: If by some goddess-like intervention I could have both a penis and my current consciousness, I would do it. In a heart beat. Now tell me where I should turn in my real transsexual card.)

Memoirist as Archeologist and What is Underneath

The process of writing memoir feels like doing the work of an archeologist. More often than not, I write for myself. Obsessions can lead to revelations.

Once the words find there way to the page, free, the excavation begins. I’ve been writing and digging for a few years now through the layers of shame. The bedrock finally (I think!) revealed itself to me recently.

Beneath the shame of intense hatred of myself for being transsexual, I find joy and a kind of serene acceptance of myself and my body.

My self-hate smothered my self-love, or so I thought. Who knew self-love can hold its’ breath forever, waiting for me to release it?

This Body

This body has worked so very hard to protect me, to heal me, to save me from myself. This body  has done everything I’ve asked of it and more. This body – my body – loves me.

Can I love my body back? International acceptance of trans human rights won’t make me less shame filled. It will make me less afraid to be among other humans in the world, but my well of internalized transphobia must be dismantled by me, and me alone.

Can I love my body back and share the joys of being transsexual? Of looking in the mirror and liking – for the most part on most days – what I see reflected back at me?

Can I love my body back and be a proud,not an arrogant, transsexual?

Can I love my body back and accept, finally and truly, the joy that lives underneath shame?

Doing so has been, and will continue to be, the most terrifying and rewarding work of my life.

And now to get it all on the page.

Submit »» Free Transgender Book
Read»»Beautiful, Breakthrough Transsexual Transition Metaphors

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Radical Acceptance: My Wonderful Transsexual Body

Shot at the Hudson Automotive Museum using a Ricoh GR2.

I like my body now. Rubbing testosterone gel on my stomach and thighs twice a day thrills me. But this hasn’t always been true.

In the past I struggled with my decision to transition and live as a man.

Many evenings ago I decided to stop taking hormones. My sexuality was muddled. I had no idea how to date women as a man. Was I even a man?

How do I date women now? My only positive sexual experiences had been as a butch woman. That fact may have influenced my desire to stop taking hormones. At least I know how to be butch.

But for reasons still unclear to me I continued taking my hormones.  Somehow I kept a  higher vision in play and remembered the excitement and pride I possessed when I first began hormones in 1996. I held fast to the thrilling fantasies I had about how great it would be to date women as a man. Somehow I would make those fantasies become a reality.

Bean sculpture, Chicago, shot on a Ricoh GR2.

Since then, each major surgical change- top surgery then bottom surgery – has altered my perception of myself in my body and myself in my gender. Last year I tweaked my hormone dosage with great result.

Now I find myself in the midst of another technological change – weight-bearing exercise. Now I have aged to a point where I must work to keep some mass on my muscles. Now I endeavor to complete ten full push ups and ten assisted pull ups. I fail, every day.

I keep trying and I keep taking hormones.

In 1996 we had no roadmaps pointing us in the direction of transsexual true north. We all winged it, and we never revealed our ambivalence. I had no idea I would feel as ambivalent as I once did without starting hormones.

We can only know some things as we go through them. Ambivalence shouldn’t surprise anyone. I now think of it as a natural part of the transitioning process.  Then I didn’t know that. Today I do.

Today I take great joy in what my body, and my body on hormones, can do. My heart continues to beat, my lungs expand and contract.

My eyes span the gym and what a wonderful thing it is that I am a man. Two decades past my first hormone dose and I still get a thrill.

Now I’m glad I kept taking hormones even when I wanted to stop that long ago night  on the freeway. I’m glad one part of me refused to listen to another part of me. I’m glad to be me today.

I’m glad to be in this body.

I’m glad to be in this transsexual body.

Submit »» Free Transgender Book
Read »» Our Monumental Desire for the Binary Gender System

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Why I Might Not Tell You I’m Transsexual

[image error]This statue lives with us. Shot with a Canon 60D.

I wasn’t ready to be welcomed.

That’s how Rev. Thomas Schade described his reluctance to involve himself fully in his new UU community (here in Ann Arbor). Being welcomed brings with it responsibilities and fears, fears that a person or persons may make us uncomfortable or ask us things we cannot commit to, the call to commitment reinforcing a belief that we can’t say no.

I understand as a transsexual.  I have been reluctant to share my history with people.

Why might I not tell you I’m transsexual?

I don’t want the possibility of a difficult conversation: The conversations where you overpersonalize my lack of disclosure (“Why didn’t you tell me!?!”) or decide my personal history for me (“Oh, I know you are born that way. That just makes perfect sense to me.”)

Right.

Thank you, by the way, for listening to me.

Sculpture behind UMMA. Shot with a Canon 60D.

 

Experience a few of these conversations, and all transsexual and transgender people have endured these awkward, uncomfortable, and frankly, immature, conversations with people, and you would say no thank you, too.

Unless I can be sure you can act responsibly and maturely when I disclose I am transsexual or transgender, I’ll say no thank you, I’m not ready to be welcomed.

Of course I’m removing myself from human interaction, or, perhaps, more pointedly, human intimacy.

But understand this: When I want to be welcomed, I must take responsibility for protecting myself against the very real possibility of these stupid, adolescent responses. The most astonishing response I ever had came from a woman – an awarded academic – who knew me when I lived as a woman.

When I reintroduced myself to her, within two minutes she asked me if I had gone all the way, a parlance for inquiring if I’ve had a phalloplasty.

Can I ask you about your genitalia any time I want?

Why might I not tell you I’m transsexual? I might have to be responsible for myself and you.  This is what an adult does with a child, not with another adult.

Who wants to risk vulnerability with someone unable to handle it?

I reject wholeheartedly societal expectations that my acceptance as a transsexual must come at the expense of my personal comfort and safety. These children-in-adult bodies believe my transgender body obligates me to tell them about my genitalia, my sex life and any thing else they want to know.

Why might I not tell you I’m transsexual?  Answering your questions reduces my dignity to your level.

Why might I not tell you I’m transsexual? It bores me sometimes.

I’ve been taking hormones now for over twenty years. I know you might care a great deal about my gender. That’s cool, sort of.

Why don’t you care more about your gender than mine?

Why might I not tell you I’m transgender?

You tell me.

Read » »My Transsexual Body

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Simplistic Transsexual Transition Metaphors

Maxi Chanel returns to the dressing room. Shot with a Ricoh GR2. Transsexuals prevail despite laboring under a loathsome metaphor: You are born in the wrong body. I have spent countless lost minutes and hours unraveling this assumption. For years I believed it, and hated myself. Now I find it a pointless and stupid metaphor. The richness of our relationships to our very corporeal being simply...

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Breakthrough, Beautiful Transsexual Transition Metaphors

Auto repair shop shot at night with a Ricoh GR2. Much of my fiction and nonfiction work seeks to dispense with two of the most unimaginative tropes used to describe transsexuals. We are born this way; or We are born in the wrong body. Transsexuals desiring medical changes to our bodies – hormones and various topographical changes to our bodies achieved through surgery – need a medical...

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Our Monumental Desire for the Binary Gender System

[image error]Playing around with a wide angle lens. Shot with a Canon 60D.
We all need the binary gender system

All of us, from non-transgender to gender queer to transsexuals, need the binary gender system.

Trans people especially need the binary gender system.

How else can we know our own gender stories?

What do we fight against? Confront? Seek to uphold or dismantle?

Who we are happens with others
[image error]People standing in front of an escalator at Gallerie Lafayette. Shot with an iPhone 6.

I believe very much our identities exist in contexts. As humans much of how we understand privilege, diversity and oppression happens in our relations with others.

We also create and recreate ourselves as we interact with and confront systems (call them ideologies, if you like) that come at us as ideas. These ideas exist without common agreement about definitions.

Just ask five strangers at a party for their definition of gender. You’ll get five different definitions. Some might sound similar but each person will have a different idea of what gender means to them.

Seeking permission
[image error]Birds leave trees. Shot with a Canon 60D.

As a transsexual, gender for me means a system of science, religion, sociology and psychology that makes my life really difficult. Most of my difficulties, because I am white and upper class, have stemmed from seeking permission.

During a seemingly prehistoric time compared to today, this permission seeking happened in the late 1990s and early aughts: Extensive psychological testing to obtain hormones; further extensive psychological testing to obtain surgeries to obtain a letter from the surgeons to request permission to change my birth certificate, and so on.

I hated the binary gender system and decided the whole thing a farce and good riddance.

If it had been so easy.

I love the binary and love to hate it.
[image error]Storm clouds open up in front of a power line. Shot with a Canon 60D.

This thing I claimed to not want actually thrived within me as a moving target. I wanted to be a real man with a real man’s body. Real operated, and sometimes still operates, as an ill-defined but quite hard psychological cudgel I use to beat myself.

Even more than the therapists and psychologists and physicians and insurance companies I claimed to despise, I needed the binary gender system.

 piny made this devastating comment in 2005:

There’s gender-benders and there’s trans. The gender-benders claim to destabilize and satirize the gender binary but really just support and worship it. The trans claim to act independently of it but actually need it to survive. Sometimes, the two categories are completely different, and sometimes they inexplicably melt into an undifferentiated whole.

Just so, twelve years later.

Of course, all of us in the transgender communities can do without the bathroom terrors, the notion that we cannot be normal, the legal and social disdain, and, for trans women of color, the realities of daily violence that have reached the level of obscenity.

Without the binary gender system how would I live?
[image error]This statue lives with us. Shot with a Canon 60D.

As a transsexual I can’t imagine my life without it. The system provided a goal. That sounds strange, like the binary gender system resembles a self-help methodology. But I knew what I wanted: To live as a man, age as one and love as one.

The idea of a gender binary appeals to me. I know my feminist and anti-patriarchal activists card will now be revoked.

I don’t care.

Feminine, feminist women attract me. I like having additional body mass, no menstruation, a beard and deeper voice.

I love suits and ties and underwear with pouches.

Guess that makes me reactionary. But I am a happy reactionary, and glad to need the gender binary.

Five Reasons Why You Should Write to Your Loved Ones

[image error]A woman in front of a delivery truck shot with a Canon 60D while pulling focus.

How many words I have written, yet none to my beloved or grandmother or dear friend?

I have written thousands of words I felt proud of, submitted them to a handfull of journals, only to have strangers reject them.

Ask me to write a tender love letter to my love, no way!

Why?

Who really am I writing for, and why? Here are five reasons why writing to our loved ones will makes us better writers and human beings.

We become fearless writers
[image error]A postal truck shot with a Canon 60D while pulling focus.

We censor ourselves when we write. That scary place in me pushing to get out on the page? Nope.

Not going to write that.

It’s too scary, too close to the bone, too {fill in the blank here}. I hesitate. My writing suffers.

Speaking our truth to our loved ones liberates us. We write in complete vulnerability, and we take that fearlessness to our pages.

 Writing honestly makes us better writers
[image error]People coming and going at the entrance to Meiji Shrine. Shot with a Ricoh GR2.

 I’ve come to realize part of me writes to touch my own heart.

Writing to my loved ones terrifies me. I have to be vulnerable and really expose my heart.

Even with the most deeply felt novel, I think sometimes we can bullshit ourselves and keep at an arm’s length from the material.

Not so with love letters.

We write to our beloved or a parent or dear friend, we know they have expertly calibrated bullshit detectors. We have no choice but to be honest and vulnerable.

Our public writing will improve as a result.

 Writing to our loved ones forces us to specific and unique
[image error]People relax in Kresge Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Shot with a Ricoh GR2

Has a loved one ever asked, what do you love about me? Like me, you may feel cornered.

Just because you’re beautiful may seem like a great first answer.

But I think it fails. It sounds like a line from a forgettable pop tune.

I love the curve of your hip when the morning summer sun streams our bedroom window seems like a much better first answer.

I’ve used honest, precise, visual images. We love specifically. Our writing ought to reflect that specificity. All of our writing.

 Writing to our loved ones trains us to better observe the world
[image error]People stroll by a toilet on the street in the 19th arrondissement. Shot with a Ricoh GR2.

If your friend exhibits great loyalty, how does he do so, specifically?

This reason differs from number three. In number two we write specifically.

Here we teach ourselves to increase our observational skills. Your friend may express his loyalty by giving you money when you most need it or defending a friend when she isn’t present or visiting you every night while you are hospitalized.

Loyalty, devotion, concern, support sound great but as words they don’t give us much by way of specifics. As we work on grounding our words in distinct behavior and explicit details, our writing will improve.

“For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” Toni Morrison

 We will all die
[image error]A man carries a long package on a rainy day by St. Sulpice in Paris. Shot with a Ricoh GR2.

Every single one of us. Death stalks us from the moment we are conceived. It is better to write our most heartfelt words for our loved ones. If we don’t, what comfort will all our publications bring?

 We didn’t write those publications for them, our loved ones, we wrote them for us, and maybe the marketplace.

We wrote them for us.

Writing to our loved ones probably strikes fear in your heart. “I can’t be that honest!”

If death takes them, and you’ve written nothing, what comfort will all your publications bring you?

 When death takes them, and you’ve written them honest, tender letters expressing your admiration and love for them, telling them how sexy you find them, and you watch their face as they read your thoughtful words, how much comfort will that expression bring you when death has taken them?

 You can’t see the expression as in a photograph. But your picture-taking mind will capture the memory forever.

Write to your loved ones as though you had only one month to live.

 What will you say to them, knowing that you, and they, will die one day?

Sure Fire Advice: Never, Ever Give Up – Diana Nyad

Diana Nyad completed a 112-mile swim from Havana to Key West when she was 64. Find a way.

If You’re Transgender, Are You Unnatural?

Bright sun on a winter day. Shot with a Ricoh GR2. People opposed to transgender rights resurrect the not-natural panic defense. You know the one. “Transsexuals are unnatural!” or “God made two genders only!” When people opposed to transgender throw down these phrases, they are toting big guns. Woman as Womb! Gaia as Mother! Woman as Nurture! Science is Bad! God is Great!

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