Subversive Number 17 - Based on a True Story

I am trying to make submissions to The Subversive which address "the spiritual side of transsexualism". Several times a week, I write a few thousand words in my "transition diary", detailing thoughts or feelings or events. I have been doing it regularly for two years now.

This writing is amazing to look back on. Every phase is so distinct, every step forward so tentative and yet momentous, and then so quickly left behind and forgotten as new developments overwhelm the old.

The "spiritual side" of the transition is proving to be the most important part of it, but also the most elusive. I am not forming precepts or coming to definite conclusions. My spiritual growth is a blind grope down a path I have never imagined; and so what I want to do is share with the readers of The Subversive some of the stages of that journey as I have experienced them.

In this and future issues, I propose to publish some edited excerpts from my diary -- not the whole diary, as Melanie is doing, but in my case only those bits which bear upon spiritual matters (loosely interpreting that term). You will be spared a lot of my personal agonies over my appearance and my relationships and my work and finances, although all of that, too, is of course part of the larger story of any transsexual's life.

I started seriously working toward my transition in April 1992, first by just "dressing" part time in public, and, luckily, finding a partner (now an "ex+) who was able to help me explore my female sexual side. I spent over a year working on my appearance, in order to make "full time" possible, and now, since July 1993, am "living full time", taking hormones, and day by day altering my social persona in the eyes of all who know me. I am scheduled for "SRS" in September 1994.

In The Subversive #15, I published two diary excerpts from September and November of 1992; and the first here is from December 1992, as the process began to deepen.

I think that my "trans-gender" status is a very great gift in my life. Of course it is also a huge hassle and expense, and sower of confusion and fear -- but the gift of it is that I am blessed with the opportunity to go through a magic door.

I am crossing, back and forth, and straddling, the breach which is normally thought of as uncrossable, that great divide in creation, between male and female. I feel the power of this magic opportunity most clearly when I am out in the natural world. I felt it acutely when I was on my long, solo Scottish and Portuguese hiking trips, when there was no human contact for most of the day, and my true inner self could fall at rest where it naturally lay, instead of being influenced by people's perceptions of me. I have never felt more undeniably female -- all of the female side of the universe was singing to me, calling out to me, and I was at home at last, welcomed and at rest.

When out in nature, I feel acutely how wide open is that "door". I feel that every step I physically take on a path is a step through the door; I feel male and female nature spirits around me, guiding me, welcoming me to a wider perception of who I am, letting me live half in "our" world and half in the spirit world, where nothing looks physically different, but which is teeming with those powers we have called fairies, dryads, dybbuks, etc. etc., which all fleetingly take a shape only to lose it again.

The essential elements of the universe -- dark and light, dead and alive, male and female -- are all one to them, they cross back and forth in split seconds. As one who is traversing the normally uncrossable, I am privileged to be a part of this company. This is a great adventure, something given to only a few, a journey to the unknown, and as great a quest as there can be in life, to become "other" and simultaneously attain oneself.

My soul, in this silly human body, is lighting up, coming alive as never before, traveling outward, reaching intently, becoming more of all and everything, all at once. It is a giant blessing and gift.

This is a night-time experience, not even a reality by the standards of day. This is another of those half-illusory nights of not sleeping until dawn, futilely chasing sleep with vodka, valium, and marijuana, shuffling down the hall, nightgown hem clutched up to my waist and tripping still; stumbling, bumping into the wall . . . . and thereby fulfilling one of the forgotten expectations of my youth, that some day I would be an adult in a big city in the midst of some complex, obscure, possibly existential dilemma, part of the world of literature and pills.

But when the grainy 16-millimeter images that fed my youthful imagination tossed up raddled, tousled, gender-uncertain faces, wavering between dissolution and absolution, who did I think I would be? Did I divine that I would stumble down that hall feeling like a transvestite, or like the archetypal over-the-hill drag queen, muttering and cursing with her makeup streaming down her face; or some other debilitated queer? Did I ever think I would stumble down that hallway feeling like a transsexual, like a creature from some fantastic fiction? Or like a woman? Or did I think my outlaw peculiarities would be somehow of a less affronting nature?

Tonight I knew, in some hidden recess of my being, that I had been destined all this time to come to this -- that this is my path, that it has brought me to that stumble down the hallway in the dark -- that it takes me toward some end which is hidden still, far beyond the darkness at the end of the hall.

Last night, I had a very strong vision, about my progress toward transsexualism. Whether it was wishful thinking, or what, I don't know; but it is the kind of thing that I usually use as my guide, in making life decisions. I do rely on my "visions" and intuition whenever it doesn't seem completely crazy.

It was a very simple vision -- simply the knowledge that forward, toward transsexualism, is the direction toward joy and life; and that backward, away from it (and therefore toward what?) is the direction of death.

I have long believed that anything that is not growing is shrinking. There is no such thing as stasis. So that is more or less the same thing. Transsexualism is growth. Anything else is not, and therefore is death.

The other day, I was walking on the street, looking up toward the sky, through the tree branches, trying to send my spirit higher in a rather literal sense, as if God and the truth and a sense of wholeness and rightness might be up there. The act of casting my spirit outward toward infinity quite simplistically made me feel that I was perhaps a bit closer to leaving behind the old life, the old male identity; as if a female identity were something purer and cleaner, more swept by the wind and clouds, something to purify my gaze and absolve my imperfections, something to be attained by reaching to a higher, better, sweeter part of my nature.

Most of that is nonsense, of course. But catching myself with this unconscious motive suddenly brought back to me a memory which I had completely forgotten since some time in my childhood. I remember it absolutely now, as if I had never forgotten it, but I probably have not thought of it for thirty-five years.

Back at that time in childhood when one still half-believes in magic -- story-book magic, the power of the certain words or the magic wand -- I used to cast my thoughts out and upward, and try to make them so clear and so strong, and so impossible for the powers of magic to ignore, that I would by magic be able to make a wish come true. And it was always the same wish: that I be turned into a girl. I remember time after time, lying in bed and thinking that I might wake in the morning and find it true, knowing all the while that it would not be so, and yet needing that thought as a buoy, something to sustain me as I went off to sleep in a world where things were inexplicably not right.

I think I had magic and religion all mixed together as one thing. Since we were not a religious family, I had no training and no ideology to give me any clear idea of what prayer was for and about, or how it was done, but it seems clear to me now that I was praying as much as I was doing anything else; for what is prayer if not trying to influence a greater power by the purity of your own desire?

And what was I doing the other day if not the same thing that I did thirty-five years ago? I was sending my thoughts, and I hoped, my soul, aloft to be transmuted. Perhaps that is what I am doing every day, in these writings, in my therapy, in my introspection: trying to find the magic spell that will not only give me the gift I seek, but also make it right, make it be God's will, make it be the work of the fairies who see a pure soul captured in mortal flesh and condescend to give it, if not freedom, a finer existence.

Last night, after all day successfully dodging and running from my sorrow and fear and loneliness, as I got ready for bed, suddenly deep sorrow and loss could not be avoided. I prepared the wide, empty bed, and reached in the closet for the pretty white nightgown that Carol had given me -- her first romantic gift to me -- and the hurt little girl inside me started to despair, and to weep; and I clutched the bundled nightgown to my heart and for a moment vacillated in consciousness between the little girl and the adult, born-male person . . . .

The fight I had won all day, to remain in control and stay on some kind of productive work schedule was no longer necessary, nor was control in general. A moment more of self-conscious weeping, an adult trying to express something, and then I leaned against the wall, hand to my brow, and I was gone . . . . Gone. A dream has disappeared, another one; and perhaps all my other romantic dreams over the years were really substitutes for this one, dreamed by the little girl -- maybe she is thirteen -- who lives inside me, yearning to grow up, yearning for love and romance and someone she can give herself to. Some words for a possible song had come to me the night before:

That is my predominant impression of my love for Carol -- holding her as I lay down, with her above me; looking up at her, admiring my prince, my boyfriend, my husband. The Wild One, who could take me somewhere I had never been; and she loved me for being young and sweet and pretty. She was above me, like the sky, stretching to every horizon of my world. She was above me like the sun, shining on me at last, and I held that sun in my arms so it would shine on me some more.

And her arms around me bound me to her, so I could let go and fall, fall all the way down yet never fall away, never hit any bottom because she held me and so I fell in place, away from care, away from fear, away from thinking or needing to care, but never away from Carol because our arms held us together, and our love held us together, falling together through an infinity; and yet the sun never falls, it is the center, and so in all time and space I could look and see I held my arms in a circle around the sun. A young girl's dream -- love to save me, love to set me free, yet never leave me alone.

One magic night, we visited the Yuba River, and swallowed some Ecstasy, and at one point ventured out under the wild profusion of stars in the country night . . . . this was at a time when it was still novel to me to wear female clothes, and so I felt all my female-ness spilling out, and I knew Carol felt I was her girl, and she was my man, so I felt new and bursting with growth, and joyous at being myself under the whole universe's big eye . . . . and we kissed under those stars, and she pressed something hard against me through her clothes and mine . . . . and later we made love and she held me, and I thought I had gone to heaven.

But it was only a dream. For all the mortal reasons I have relentlessly analyzed elsewhere, no matter what I felt I was getting from Carol's love, she did not get what she needed from me. The awful reality intruded, that I did not have a free ride; it was not enough to let myself go and fall into her grasp. Like all first-love dreams of girls who fall in love with The Wild One, the dream evaporated, turned to something harder and sterner and easier to grasp, but as unwelcome as full daylight after a night of stars. It turned to human relations, the stuff of the adult world, where there are needs and compromises and negotiations and realistic understandings.

Last night, the little girl cried. The adult's body was leaning against the wall, but the little girl was lost, somewhere far away in grief and mourning, hovering on the lip of falling again, but this time with no one to hold her, falling into that infinity all by herself, with no sun in the sky, no arms around anything. The sun had turned angry, the sun had turned sullen and unwilling, the sun had turned away and was gone.

The little girl came back, found herself standing in the hall, and the adult tried to recover and prepare to go to bed.

The little girl had come back just a bit different. Only a little, but older and wiser, as the expression goes. And the adult realized that that girl has to continue to live and grow.

At first I thought perhaps she would be gone, if Carol is gone. I thought she had no life without Carol. But instead I think my time with Carol has summoned her forth, and she needs to grow, to grow up. If there is to be a complete adult woman in this body, she will need an adolescence. The adult's brain is working fairly well, but her emotional underpinnings are merely vestigial.

As I was slowly descending toward a tense sleep, I found my mind was back in time, picturing clearly a juncture of my life that was like a fork in the road. The reason my female self is only now beginning to grow from about age thirteen is that that was the age when I had to embark upon one road or another in life -- the age of puberty, of course, and of increasingly gender-specific socialization. Not knowing I had any alternative, and more importantly, not knowing I was making a choice, I went down the path which I can see so clearly now in retrospect. There is a process which I imagine is more or less the same for everyone, which I can recall participating in, with its slow day-by-day effect. That process is the building of one's social persona, which is related to but not quite the same as one's "self".

In learning how people react to you, you learn who to be. That which works well, you repeat. That which you feel expresses yourself clearly and to the effect you wanted, you learn to summon again. That which people tell you they think you are, you believe. There is scarcely any other way to know who you are in the world. Who they think you are becomes who you think you are, and you act as the person they think you are, which convinces them further that it is true, and they tell you it is true, and so little by little in some sense that becomes who you are. You can go your whole life believing that you are who you have always been.

I developed, from that fork in the road, at age thirteen, into something that I and others believed was a man. It took me years to fully comprehend that my inner feeling about myself in the world is widely divergent from what is usually understood to be the male sensibility.

So there is another path I can tread; part of my task is to go back and take that other fork, let that girl be socialized again, this time in a way that is more pleasing to her tastes and inner balance. In the meantime, the adult can also learn to live in the world as a woman; but she will never be whole until the girl catches up, to inhabit her.

Last night, as I sat in the living room, taking a break from work, I was dressed in a comfortable skirt and sweater. I was smoking a cigarette, which I seldom do, and felt, I realized, like a somewhat different person, sitting there in my feminine clothes, and with my cigarette poised between my fingers. I suddenly felt a persona inside of myself which is struggling toward complete existence -- the female persona, of course.

I realized that the female persona is somewhat different from the male person I have been for so long. I have been writing about the growth of the young girl inside of me, growing up to inhabit the woman who I will become; but in fact I have just barely begun to become acquainted with the female persona. The male must move over and make room, and then relinquish primacy, and then -- what? Disappear altogether? I don't know -- is there some process of assimilation?

In any case, I felt that the habits and attitudes and tastes of the female person were at that moment quite clear to me. Thus to my surprise I realized that there is a different person who I may become.

And it suddenly struck me, since I was understanding her as a truly different person -- not just my male self in a skirt -- that there is indeed a very good reason why, nearly universally, transsexuals change their names -- and not just because they don't want to be a woman named Henry. One begins to understand the new persona as a separate person, with new, different, characteristics and habits. The taking of a new name is necessary, because everything and everyone must have a name. So for the first time, amazed, I seriously contemplated that I may need to do it, too. Perhaps keeping the old name will be a roadblock to really admitting the new persona.

What changes, and what remains the same, in a complete transsexual transformation, has so far been a mystery to me. Now, after last night, it seems perhaps that the old wine of my spirit -- my soul? -- will be getting a more thoroughly new bottle than I realized. It will not be just the body, the clothes, the carriage; not even just the emotions, the social assumptions, the spiritual attitude. It seems it may be the very basic manifestation of the individual, something which I had thought immutable, the very "self" which we think of as our core being. This is truly becoming a re-birth, much more so than I could have ever imagined.

I have thought I could keep the old name, because it is not particularly gender-specific. Perhaps I still may, but this is something at least to consider. My spirit has inhabited the male person for so long -- and the male is now a bit reluctant to let go, I think. Will it fight to keep the old name, and if so, is it fighting to retain primacy, when it must let go?

Should I change my name to Katherine? That is clearly the name that awaits me if I choose to change it. My fictional "Katie" character has always been my surrogate. (Could I change my name and, since it is already established, let my male name be a pen name? That could lead to a very odd, schizoid life.)

This remains to be seen. But I do already know that I had better let Katherine in. And I may be performing a more profound act than I can possibly know.

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"BASED ON A TRUE STORY"

excerpts from the transition diary of Katherine Collins