Dyssonance

Too many progressives and politicians are still using old-school divide-and-conquer tactics. They’re slinging mud, scheming and using fear tactics. It’s no surprise that these strategies play a large hand in the fact that people are so frustrated and disheartened with politics. The sad thing is that these tactics go against every ideal that leads to progress: inclusion, reason, justice and hope. – Kyrsten Sinema

I’m curious; does anyone disagree with that?

If you don’t, do you ever use fear as an excuse not to do something?

If you do, why?

I’m guilty of such. Fairly constantly – not fear, but the slinging of mud, the scheming (I was sorta raised on Art of War of The Prince).

As tactics, they *can* work. In tactical situations – such as warfare.

I’m not exactly tired of war, however. I’m not wholly against war, in general, as a general concept. I am not a pacifist – I do believe there are times when violence is necessary and defense is a good thing.

Survival is probably the best example of such a time when it’s worthwhile. Not many others. Of course, when I’m angry, I’m not reasoning – I am reacting. And so I have to work beyond anger.

Which is a good thing to focus on – for one, it’s something I have influence and control over. For another, I have a good reason to do so.

I am coming up on an anniversary.

Three years ago, I started a process that took me a solid two to complete, and that process started with a question summed in a single word:

Why.

The trigger for it was a moment of anger, as well – quite fitting, really, in my eyes, as I’m somewhat fixated on the anger that I feel so easily, and that for far too many years I just stored inside me and moved on and ignored until it was of value to me.

I consider February 25^th to be another anniversary, although the 18^th is pretty closely tied in with that. But October is a special month.

On October 13^th, 2006 (a Friday the 13^th, LOL) I sat in a small room with a wonderful woman and I uttered some words to her.

In the first few minutes of October 12^th, 2006, I had written a brief email, saying I think I need to talk to someone and requesting a suggestion.

That email read:

Hello.

Thanks to the incredible convenience of the age we live in, I’m sitting here in the middle of the night, in Glendale, not too far away from Glendale Community College, sending an email to a cardio doctor I’ve vaguely heard of in the newspaper and only within the last 12 hours discovered that not only is she local, but she might be able to help me with something that I’m starting to realize I need help with.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, and I’ve rewritten this part now four times, and I had best do it before I allow cowardice to overcome me.

I need to talk to someone.

So if at all possible, I would like to speak with someone who is reasonably familiar with this dysphoria issue. If for nothing else, to help me work through some of the thoughts in my head enough to see if the amount of effort I’ll put into making the fees I’ll have to pay a therapist is going to be worth it.

I’m terribly sorry for interrupting your day with this, and I apologize greatly if asking you is an imposition, but after a lot of work, yours is the first email address I’ve found where — and this is the terrible part — I feel somewhat comfortable breaching normal etiquette because you happen to live in my beloved Arizona.

Disregard this if it’s in imposition.

Thank you, however, for sharing your thoughts on your website.

I have no clue how to sign this.

And yes, I do still have that email. I have 10 years worth of emails, lol. The only exception is one specific person who I already discussed. I’ve lost a few to crashes and even some to old accounts abandoned long ago.

It was just less than 8 hours later that I got a reply.

Had it been longer than a day, I would not have gone on with it. And during those nearly eight hours, I kept looking and seeking and hunting and digging and reading and learning and generally doing what I do when I hit a moment of absolute focus and utter concentration – I absorbed.

It was an interesting time. I was in “high speed” mode. I read the entirety of CatKisser/Radical Bitch‘s website about her goddess faith in that time, I think – I may be wrong, but it strikes me as coming from that time frame. I read six forums and about a third of AmberSpace. Some of them I was reading simultaneously with others because back then I was at my workstation, which consisted of three computers and three monitors all linked together and I could read up to seven different websites simultaneously.

I still can do so when that sort of moment hits me, but even so, I can think of only one other time when I became so utterly focused to the exclusion of all else to that degree and with that intensity, and that was when I wrote my last full novel – after which I got up and made a wonderful cocktail in an attempt to kill myself. That one lasted for three weeks. This time it lasted for about four and a half.

Sleep was, at best, done in an hour or two increments. I was doing roll your owns back then, and went through a full canister, chaining so fast and furious I wasn’t aware of it. I drank tea, constantly, ate only things I didn’t have to spend more than five minutes preparing.

That morning of the 13^th, I made a phone call. It was an early one, I got a machine, and I left a message, literally shaking as I did it.

I got a return call within four hours, and presto, I had an appointment that day.

And, again, had that call not come, I would have let the fear and the cowardice overwhelm me, and done nothing.

I finally got around to responding to the person I’d written to first, and this is what I wrote then:

Thank you.

Your simple kindness in a single moment of a reply has not only changed my world, it has changed me.

Your words, so delicately written and placed online, have been incredibly uplifting, and brought clarity and hope.

I can say right now that had you not replied, I would not have gone further on my own. I would not have had the moment that came later, or the utter peace that has enveloped me now.

I can’t say that you saved my life. Although, given my bad habits after so many years, you may end up doing so at some point, lol. But you definitely saved me.

Not sure that makes sense as it’s written, but in my skull it does.

Thank you.

And, in looking back today on that, I can say that she didn’t actually write all that much, but the tiny bit she did write had that great an impact on me.

I am not certain that I was fully conscious of why it was that I was trying to kill myself the many years past – I don’t think I realized how the novel I’d written was really about an expression of what I longed for.

That was how deeply I had buried this. That was how strong my resistance to this was.

It wasn’t a thing that had waxed and waned, that would drive its way up in my life and then fade out for a time only to return.

It was something constant for me, unreleased, unacknowledged, unfaced.

And yet, I *did* know. I knew about transfolk. Quite well, lol. To me it was always a sort of given that one day I’d just change my sex – but it wasn’t the sort of thing that was really dwelt on, really considered, in practical terms. I just sorta figured that one day my wish would be granted – this wish that I made every single night of my life, without fail, without surcease, without pause, without question.

I had leaked, in the merest, most miniscule of ways; ways I was hardly aware of myself at the time, as the only point in all the day that I would even possibly give a moment to consider that maybe this was it, was in those few moments before sleep.

It was November before I stopped doing it. Before I believed, finally, that I was enroute, at last, at long bleeping last.

That maybe it was possible, that maybe it would happen.

The first six months of this whole thing sucked.

I found myself unable to focus on the work I had been doing. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The expenses I had just to live were too high for me to be able to really move forward with transition, so I acted to reduce them when an opportunity presented itself – I would move in with someone. The change was dramatic – I’d lived alone a long time at that point, having separated two years earlier lest my rages introduce harm to my kids.

I struggled to get some sense of normalcy back – only to have to move just as I as getting my groove back and with no forewarning whatsoever. One afternoon I went out to get some food, when I came back, I was informed I needed to move out.

There were people there for me. I ended up in a dilapidated trailer in Florida with water that smelled like sewage and a floor that decided to give way now and then, a restroom that had no floor and was open to the world.

I finally got out of there thanks to Les. Came home, to Phoenix, again, finding a small apartment and beginning my job search, still part time.

I went fulltime in October, having gotten nowhere in my job search, having come to a point where I was paralyzed in bed for a entire day, not getting up from it once, as I couldn’t move past the fear of going fulltime while I couldn’t stand to put on the wrong clothes anymore. I had worn them as armor, and they were too heavy, too confining, and I wanted to be free of them.

I started school, and then the eviction came, triggered by going fulltime, and once again things fell apart, made worse by what had become a point of feeling stalled, feeling trapped, feeling as if there was no escape.

Not too far distant from how I feel now, actually.

I landed with help again, and then had a miracle happen, as I soon had the name and birth certificate changed, and became who I am in law as well as in day to day life.

That day in March when I held my social security card and printed confirmation of change there, my ID with everything right, my birth certificate – all the things to prove who I am – that day was incredible for me. That was when transition ended for me. But it wasn’t until the following year that I realized it. From that point on, it’s been all about growing as just a woman.

I paid prices for all of it. I’ve come to accept that prices had to be paid for everything.

I’ve run out of currency, though.

Activism and advocacy have been wrapped up in my being since 2007 in the physical sense – that is, when I started putting my physical self into the action and less of my mental self. Then I added the rest.

By May of this year, I was living it, breathing, and instead of taking a break like I knew I would need to, I kept going.

And then I ran into a breakaway group from the main HBS crowd.

At first, I thought I had something In common with them. I’m a woman. I’m independent. I actually kinda like *some* of the HBS ideas and agree with much of it (though not other parts and decidedly not the part where they limit their kind to a handful of specific narratives and disallow multiplicity of being).

As I got to know them, they startled me, though, with things that I knew were wrong, things that worked against being empowered, positive members of the society we live in. Things which argued against inclusion, things which argued against reason, against justice, against hope.

Things that sought to keep things the way they were.

And then I went deeper, and discovered it had little to do with that. It had to do with shame, with sexism, with bigotry.

But by then, the worm had found a way in.

And I had to pull back, and then back again, and then finally set everything aside, because the pressure inside me was still growing, is still growing, and it’s overwhelming me.

I’m done with transition – that journey of perception by that plurality of others, where I went from being seen as a man to being seen as a woman.

But I still have a problem to attend to, and this group uses it as a hammer, as a wedge, granting it magical powers and sacred energy, worshipping it and condemning with ferociousness its cultural opposite.

And you can’t help but feel it then, you can’t readily make it through exposure to them without being hammered by it, not when you wish so badly you can taste it, not when you are feeling the first niggling fears that it will never happen.

Not when you know that it must happen, and you have only so much time left to do it in.

Earlier I said I knew about transsexuals.

I’d seen TV shows, of course, I’d caught an occasional news story or documentary or even a newspaper article.

But TV wasn’t something I watched a lot of as an adult.

I knew them because in the early 90′s I was pointed to a group called ISNA.

And in the early 2000′s I left that group.

What I heard was mixed – balanced isn’t the word for it, as there was a great deal of animosity underneath a lot of it, but also a great deal of agreement because back then, in that body, the issues were seen as complements of one another – not the same, not even related, just sharing certain realistic issues in dealing with the society overall.

Over time, that changed. Especially in a period that many dislike, a period that saw what was felt to be a betrayal happen, a period that saw a leader do something unthinkable but still hard to argue with.

There are new bodies now. New people, new issues, new attitudes, and as they rose, I faded out.

I once had a page here that talked about why, but why isn’t important, isn’t of value here. Just as it wasn’t important before, wasn’t of value before.

Here is now, not then.

Now I am dyssonance. Back then I was someone else living a life that was not the one I live today.

And I’m glad of it, and better for it, and I’m satisfied with it.

Except for this one problem, which nags me constantly.

I’m angry about it. So angry I lash out at others around me. I look for targets and reasons and then I chew them up in a way that only someone with the practice I’ve had can do so.

And, as ever, they turn to comments about appearance.

I am not ashamed of how I appear. I am proud of it, thrilled to have what I have now and I have no clue how I can keep waiting for the last little bit, a slim triangle, to be changed.

I come now, to the end of my third year since I let go of one fear, having escaped many, many more, and as I have, I’ve come to a realization regarding this particular group of people.

They may have transitioned to actually be themselves, and the people they may be could actually be pretty much everything I am not.

That is, they could very well wish to be sexist, heteronormative reinforcing sorts.

The question then becomes, of course, so what if they are?

And I ask this question at a time in my life where, for whatever reasons, I am deeply questioning where I want to go, what I want to do, and how I want to do it in relation to trans lives and the changes that I seek to make.

I am aware I have many, many readers who do not comment. Indeed, less than 1% of them do. Well, no, that’s not quite accurate.

Ok, quick and simple math puts the number at 3% of total readers on average.

I don’t know who reads my stuff. I have an idea of some folks who are more familiar with what I write than they might be expected to be, but not certain.

I can say I am not all that widely read. Unless there really are only 10,000 transfolk (the standard, conservative estimate of the total number per the DSM-IV). Which has many, many flaws to it, even admittedly so by every major authority.

However, I am on a quest, I have discovered. It is not a fun one – the questing beast I pursue is a challenging one, as they always are, ever elusive, and I am a poor substitute for a gallant Knight.

That’s the job of my boyfriend.

My quest is many fold, and I’m aware that for much of it, I shall be a certain woman of La Mancha, tilting at a rainbow.

The stuff I’ve written about of late – it’s all basic stuff. Stuff I learned early on, and stuff I thought through, and stuff I did not trust until I did my own digging and my own researching and my own work on developing out. Much of it was tested, in a sort of crucible that counts far more than any that I will encounter within the trans community, as it was tested among the worst of those *outside* the trans community, and if you can stand your ground against them, you can hang tough against damn near anything.

And I’d like to say that it was a good experience, but I can’t.

I know a hundred transmen and women who have done likewise. I know because many of them are still doing it, still holding out and standing strong, and still reaching those who are the hardest to reach.

I think back to Dasein, and his patient, quiet struggle most often. He taught me more about transmen than any such (sorry Ethan). His name gives away much, lol.

And yet, those basics, they are important. They set the stage for what is to come, and here, at least, that will be just as important as the parts that preceded them – the nature of the concepts of transsexual and transgender not as transpeople see them, but as the broader world sees them.

Because one thing about all that effort I put into testing it was in a place that I knew did not stand for the rest of the country, but only a small and vocal part of it.

A very small part of it.

And so, I’ve come to the realization that while education within is needed, I’m too assertive within, too willing to allow the wounds and the hurts I feel from inside to affect my message and my efforts.

You cannot fight a battle on three fronts. Sun would have said withdraw, and I am, and it is a bitter sting to my pride and I often feel it a flag on my honor – but my opponents see neither of those things in me, and my allies will know this already.

But I cannot simply ignore the need to educate within the community. Nor can I sit by and let falsehood be spoken by those who would seek to return to a time not present for two score years.

So what to do? At this point, the two actions and my personal approach to things don’t conflict at all, but I cannot spend the energy doing both – educating within and without.

And yet…

If I spend my time educating without, and the community shifts, as could happen, because the anger is still there, and the target of that ire, community wide, is still somewhat aimed at our allies of the moment, what will I be educating for?

And there is another factor – where my skills lie. I’m a halfway decent researcher, a marginally skilled writer, and I’m gregarious and, ahem, attention getting.

These things can be of value in my career as a politician.

They are not so good at the educating others beyond the community part, though – again, the passion is too great, the assertiveness too strong. And I am not likely to become less assertive, lol.

But what is not seen here, on my blog, is where they can come in handy. Where the value of them lies is in the personal, one on one contact, and I have a heart in that.

I enjoy that. It allows me to not *have* to do much, to remain reactive in my educational efforts, and to use experiences and knowledge in a non threatening, non adversarial manner that is critical when you are assertive.

Words on a page are not as potent as a face and a laugh and yes, much to the chagrin of many, a nice pair of ta-tas

Not too many women like it, but I am indeed among those who don’t find it terrible until you strip them of agency – until you take away thir control over their use of such.

I am sex positive, as well, and find that prostitution needn’t be a bad thing, and certainly shouldn’t be an unspeakable thing.

Indeed, anyone who finds such to be embarrassing has shame issues, and is, in fact, leaving them in the cold – even if they aren’t sex positive, they do need to acknowledge it, they do need to be aware of it.

Or they are, instead, merely turning their backs on other transsexuals, even some who share their views otherwise.

I know this, as well. Because unlike many, I know them personally – and not just one or two, but many, many of them, still working, still proving on a daily basis things others are too ashamed to even think of yet.

And I need to reclaim my own views as well, from areas I haven’t touched on – the intersections that are so much a part of my personal life and personal experience.

Because it’s time to do so, to strip away the veneer of cultural hegemony that has polluted our voices, and remained the same while the population around it has changed.

And yes, that means talking about race from a mixed standpoint. That means talking about transfeminism and transsexism.

That means exploring a few other things and then collating it all into a book, and getting the damn thing published.

Because I have a center to build. And that will take money. And once I have built it, and completed it, then there will be fewer women like myself who struggle to find a way to get through this.

And a lot more who will learn that some ideas are poison, and others are only about inclusion, reason, justice, and hope.

(edited by request of CatKisser)

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