Sex, Gender, and Performance, Part 2: Of Transgender Youth and Personal Aging

Hello My Dear One,

How are you?  Has the summer been going well?  I hope that your activities have been fun, uplifting, renewing, and restoring.  My activities have varied from babysitting, to laundry, to gardening, to laundry, to speaking, and yes, to more laundry.  But really, I've enjoyed my time relaxing, reading, and occasionally getting an opportunity to do my other "job," the one I love almost as much as I love nurturing my family.  

Real live transgender individual...

I recently gave a talk to a group of mental health providers at a transgender workshop who work with youth and young adults, about what my transgender life experiences have been like.  I love these opportunities to provide people with a more personalized learning experience.  I awaken early, primp, prep, and arrive at the engagement excited.  As much as I love my day to day work, which is quite a bit, I would gladly do this, my speaking and consulting full time.  I am most comfortable in front of a group, divulging personal information, with the understanding that I am (hopefully) broadening people's knowledge of and comfort with transgender issues. 

When I begin a talk I often challenge groups to find their own preconceived notions and assumptions about how they view people and how that determines their interactions with others/clients.  At this particular event this did not go the way I planned.  Not in the slightest.  The phrase "hot mess" comes to mind.  But let me start with what I usually do for my talks.  

I almost always come to an event dressed in a suit coat, button down shirt, tie, and nice pants and shoes.  I am often introduced to the group by one of the coordinators, and then I introduce myself to the group.  I tell everyone that there is not a single question that I will not answer, or that I have not been asked.  I assure them that they cannot offend me, and if they don't feel comfortable asking something out loud, to please write it down and make sure that it is passed to me before the end of the session.

The presentation begins with a little ice-breaker where I have participants stand up, stretch, look to their right, then look to their left, and then sit back down.  I explain that in those 5-10 seconds each person made assumptions about the people next to them, such as race, gender, socio-economic class and possibly a few other things.  I go on with an interactive review of the acronym for sexual and gender orientation, LGBTQIQA: Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual; Transgender/Transsexual; Queer; Intersex; Questioning; and Allies.  It is then that I ask the group what label or labels they would like to place on me, and with a little bit of help, the group offers guesses, or raises their hands when I say a term.  I intersperse this with humorous comments and try to form a shared group unity.

This particular time, knowing that the conference had just started with group rules and overview, and everyone seemed a little somber, I introduced myself, gave some details about myself, and asked what label(s) they wanted to assign to me.  And that's when it all derailed.  I rarely if ever am asked questions during this part, there were 3 or 4 interruptive questions, and I have never, ever been questioned as to why I was doing this exercise.  Perhaps because I hadn't started with the ice-breaker I had not properly set the tone, however, I've deviated from the script before and not had these results.  But this happened, one of the participants challenged me as to the validity of the exercise, the need for labels, and if I was trying to "trick" them.   I was for the first time in my life completely thrown off and unsure of how to handle the situation.  Thankfully one of the conference leaders, a good friend of mine, helped to explain that I was in fact trying to make people feel uncomfortable, as the participant had expressed, and that it was to help us all understand that no matter how objective we may think we are, we still bring our own assumptions with us to situations.  I was incredibly grateful for this lifeline and I felt a sense of security, that even if things weren't going perfectly, at least my message was still being heard.

Yet somehow I had a hard time resetting, moving on, and felt unable to really tell my story in the way that I normally do.  I was reeling from being heckled, and I wasn't recovering well.  I eventually pulled it together and answered as many questions as possible, sort of turning the event into a Q&A session rather than a narrative.  I received high praise from participants and was complimented by the group leaders.  Still, I left feeling weird, unsure of myself, and on edge.  I wasn't able to figure out what had happened and I wondered what I did or didn't do that had changed the outcome so drastically, at least in my eyes. I knew that my perception of the event was different from everyone else's and I took solace in knowing that I did impart knowledge, understanding, experience, and hopefully a more human picture of what living as a transgender individual can be like.

More importantly though, I decided that I had to use this experience as a learning opportunity for myself, and that I needed to assess why it occurred, and how I could have handled or might handle it in the future in different ways.

As I did this I came up with a couple of truths about myself that I have neglected to acknowledge whenever I do these events:

     1) I have not been a teenager for 20 years.

Although I know this intellectually, I have never really taken it in at an emotional level.  This is further complicated by the therapeutic work I have done, as it has helped me to leave much of my teen angst and trauma behind.  It's not that I don't remember it, it's just that I no longer dwell in it, and am no longer triggered by the memories themselves.  I have chosen to grow up, and I am no longer the immature, irrational, narcissistic, and tortured teen that I was.  I choose not to rehearse and relive my past, and at the same time my past is a large part of the narrative in my speaking career.  This leaves me learning how to retell my history so that it still has emotional meaning and connection for an audience.  And I can draw on what was, hopefully with a compassionate objectivity, that allows others to feel the pain as well as the hope that I now have.


   2) I have no idea what it means to be a teen in today's world.

I grew up in the 1970's, and the 1980's.  Life was simply different in those years, the influence of media was a tiny fraction of what it is today.  If I had been exposed to as much as the average teen is today when I was 15, I might not have ever ventured into the world at all.  For all the conveniences that we are afforded, the use of anonymous hatred spewed out at others through the internet comes at a higher price than we care to acknowledge.  Being a teenager is hard enough, I cannot imagine what it is like when you have people from all over the world "hating" you.  And there is the crux of the matter.  I am not a teen in today's world, feeling the hatred of others, trapped by my own hormonal hell, with images, and words bombarding my every waking minute.  

Instead, I am a grown man, a husband, a father of 2 sons, and a true blue friend to those I love and care about.  I am a professional speaker, writer, and consultant.  I am a dedicated educator and employee.  I am not a kid anymore, watching the world speed past me, rather I am the adult who is an active participant in his life.  I am no longer a tortured teen, flailing through a world I both fear and want to conquer, all at the same time.      

As I have spoken to providers who are working with teens right now, in the 2nd decade of the 21st century, I have realized that there is a far greater range of gender expression, gender fluidity, and terminology today.  There is information readily available from the internet, psychologists, counselors, and people like myself, who are willing to talk about what this thing called "transgender" is and what the process has been like for us.  And as I have developed as a speaker over the past 15 years, the questions I am asked have changed. I no longer need to answer technical questions about hormones and anatomy.  The how-to's of transition have been replaced with more thoughtful questions about my role as a husband, father, teacher, and friend.  And in retrospect, I see that this is what those providers most needed to hear.  

And that is what I have realized was the problem for me at the particular speaking event I did.  I reveal myself completely, make myself totally vulnerable, and dive into aspects of my life that are simply not easy to talk about.  I am willing to expose myself because I know that when I do so I open doors for people, doors for individuals who are like me, and doors for those who work with and attempt to help those like me.  That day, it was my vulnerability that was being challenged, and that is why I was so shaken by it.  My vulnerability, my own self, was not respected or treated with dignity, because this individual was unable to get past their own walls of discomfort.  And I was unable to meet this person where they were.  I couldn't see them as a beloved child of G-d because I was having a hard time seeing it in myself.  Looking back I can see it clearly, and I can try to remember it when and if this happens again. 

So, was it worth it?  Was putting my vulnerability out there helpful to the group I spoke to?  Will it make a difference in the life of a teen who is feeling completely alone in a world of shame?  The answer is ultimately an unknown, but I hope that the answer is yes.  

A Different View of
Vulnerability

I believe that my story, my history is still valid, even if it is not the same set of realities facing young trans folk today.  How I felt as a child, knowing that I was male, even though the rest of the world believed otherwise, is exactly what today's youth are experiencing too.  What it feels like to live with an enormous secret and fear that dominates your life.  I am called to share my past, the teen years that were as defining at that time as they are for youth today, and how I have moved forward.  That's the message the teens I talk to need to hear, just as much as the adults who are helping them.  That here I am, a living breathing transman, who has made it to the other side of transition, stronger and better than I was before. 

And I know that when I speak for a group the next time, I will take with me the truths I have learned from my struggles, and I will offer the gift of hope to those I share my story to.  It is what I have to offer and I thank G-d for the opportunity everyday.

Thank you for being a part of my story.

Be well, love your neighbor as you love yourself, and remember to actually love yourself.

-Ari 

Of Mental Illness, Accountability, and Adoption

Hello My Dear One,

How are you?  I am busy, and not in that good way when you feel productive after finishing a project.  No, I'm just busy, flitting from task to task, chore to chore, and wondering why everyone thinks that educators have summers "off."  The truth is we continue to work all summer long, prepping, studying, shopping, planning, raising our own kids who have the summer off, and a majority of us take 2nd and 3rd jobs to supplement our incomes.  As an hourly worker, this is especially true for me.  But even the salaried employees frequently take on extra work to support their families.  And, "summer" is not June, July, and August - three glorious months of fun and sun, but really the last 2 weeks of June through the first 3 weeks in August.  If we're lucky that's 10 weeks total.  

At any rate, in the hectic pace of my summer I have been writing a lot, in my head, which although valuable in its own right, fails to share my thoughts as effectively as when I actually write them down.  As I have continued my work in providing parenting for my 2 sons and "sitting" for 2 other boys, while dispersing contents of my mother's home, I have found myself less and less motivated to write.  Which ultimately means that I need to spend even more time writing if I am to save my sanity.  So, here I am, present to the true needs of my life, having survived another brutal heatwave, questioning my often self-defeating behaviors.

I've had many therapy sessions this summer, most of which have been delving into my learned patterns of sacrifice and martyrdom.  It is a vicious cycle that was modeled for me throughout my entire childhood and continues to be utilized by both of my parents to this day.

1) Feeling unworthy of love and/or generalized unworthiness.
2) Attention seeking words and behaviors.
3) Offering myself and my resources to others in unhealthy ways due to fears of rejection.
4) Resentment for being treated poorly or underselling myself.
5) Self inflicted sacrifice of my needs and wants because of feeling unworthy of love.
6) Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

Intellectually I can fully understand this crazy loop and that I ought to be able to find ways to prevent it, stop it mid-cycle, or at the very least stop the sacrificing of my needs and wants when I realize what I've done.  If only it were that simple.  The patterns of these thinking and behavior have been seared into my very being.  It reminds me of trying to merge on or off of a roundabout in Paris, France or Augusta, ME, either you go full bore into it and make the loops until you can actually get off or you freeze before entering and decide that abandoning your car is the safer and easier choice.

All of this has its roots in my family of origin and my upbringing.  I could spend pages upon pages concerning incidents that cemented the behaviors I have nurtured and used to torture myself and others, detailing each wrong or hurt that I experienced.  Instead, I will attempt to pull the meaning out of the minutiae, leaving the disturbances behind, in the past where they belong.  And this is what I have spent the most time working on during the past few months, learning to sift through the muck of my past and see where the real accountability needs to be placed.  I am learning to separate my parents' accountability for their actions from their mental illnesses, and subsequently my own negative patterns and the choices I have made and sometimes still make in my daily life.

My parents' influence on me and the molding and shaping that they did from before my birth is the starting place. From the beginning of their marriage they were an unlikely pairing.  They had known each other since the 1st grade, from sunday school and church, and from living in a really small town. The two families were actually related, and my parents' are indeed 5th cousins.  Having gone their separate ways after high school graduation, mom and dad re-met at a Christmas Eve service, both having recently ended relationships.  They were engaged less than a year later.  The wedding itself occurred mostly because my aunt had decided not to marry her fiance at the last minute, and my grandmother was bound and determined that there would be a wedding come hell or high water.  So, my parents married and began a miserable life together, each sacrificing their own wants and needs for the "happiness" of the other.  My mother relinquished her New York City operatic career, and my father left his friends, family, and academic career to move to a tiny beach town next door to his in-laws so that his wife might act "less crazy."  I think that from the outside most anyone could have seen the disaster that was already underway, but from the inside, it must have been harder to visualize.  My father resented the fact he had sacrificed, as did my mother, the marriage itself was a sacrifice for both parties, and my birth was the ultimate sacrifice for both of them.  But one must remember that they both made choices.  This concept has become very important to me as I have dealt with my own struggles.

In the end, I found that I had to ask and then answer some difficult questions.  Does all of their sacrifice mean that they were not accountable for their thoughts, behaviors, and actions?  Because they both suffered from mental illness are they exempt from culpability when it comes to the suffering and pain that I endured?  Do their life choices, because they were made through lenses of borderline personality disorder, anxiety, PTSD, undiagnosed autism spectrum differences, ADD/ADHD, and their own learned behaviors from their parents, grandparents, and other family members excuse what they did to me?  Do their lives trump mine?  Are their beasts of mental illness stronger than mine?  Are their beasts allowed a greater freedom than mine?

In order to answer those questions I realized that I had to turn to my own learned behaviors and how I have enacted them throughout my life journey so far.  Up until recently my preferred method of dealing with emotional conflicts was through passive-aggressive mutters, whines, and rants along with physical isolation, hiding, running away, driving at unsafe speeds, and putting my loved ones and myself in danger.  I reenacted almost all the scenes from my childhood with minor adjustments to fit the situations.  I got stuck in that loop of ugliness and just kept going around and around it until people around me moved farther and father away from my reckless spinning through life.

These frightening revolutions have been devastating to my personal and professional life over the years.  Much the same way as they were for my parents.  That cycle of unworthiness that sometimes seems to ooze right out of my skin has been at the foundation of my sense of self.  I loathe myself, and then I loathe others, and then back to loathing myself.  It is like a tire stuck spinning in mud, sinking deeper with each revolution.  The more you try to gun the engine to move in any direction, the more you are sucked into the mire below you.

It is an ugly truth of my life, the mud I have spun myself around in has led me to abandon those I love for selfish and self-centered reasons.  And in the end it comes down to a single word that I fear more than most, choice.  If I have choices to make and I make poor ones, and I have mental illness, am I accountable for the consequences, and to what degree? Some of my choices have indeed been driven by my beast of mental illness when it was untreated.  But many of my choices have been driven by me.  The hard fact is that I am the one who is ultimately accountable for my beast's actions, because I am the one who can choose to let it run boundless in through my world.  I am also accountable because I can choose to go to therapy, take medications, make healthy living decisions, have a spiritual life, and pay attention to myself and others when my beast tries to raise its wild and flailing self in the middle of my life.  Whether I like it or not,  I have the choice to let the madness take over, or I can choose to keep the madness in check.

And this is where I choose, I choose accountability as a husband and a father, as well as the numerous other titles I use throughout my travels.  Instead of blaming my mental illness for the mistakes I've made, I am learning to own them, to claim them, to grieve the harm I've caused, and to celebrate the ways in which I have helped and can help others in the future because of my experiences.  I am beginning to see that I am responsible for what was, and for how I acted in many situations, and that each one is in the past and I no longer need to dwell there.  I am learning that I can make different choices whenever I want to, in word, in thought, in deed, and even in my perceptions of what is happening around me.  I can be that man, that father, un homme de dieu - a man of G-d - in heart and in vocation.  As I make choices, rather than believing that I have made sacrifices, I am granted control of myself and my beast.  I am finally the one telling my beast what to do rather than allowing it to tell me what to do.   

So, what am I telling my beast to do?  I am telling it that it doesn't need to fear being a father to my sons.  Now, I have been their parent since the day each one was conceived, albeit through extra measures that did not include my DNA.  And when each beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous son was born I was there, laughing, crying, present to the moments of becoming for all of us.  What I wasn't was able to be listed on their birth certificates, because at that point in time my own birth certificate still had the wrong sex listed on it.  I was also not legally married to my wife because gay marriage wasn't legal yet.  When we did legally marry as man and woman, after my birth certificate and driver's license were corrected to say Male, the State of Maine recognized me as my own children's step father.  In the legal analysis we determined that I would have to adopt my sons in order to correct my status as their father and to get new birth certificates for them.  

Now, what does my beast have to do with all of this?  It turns out, that the answer is, everything.  I/it was afraid that my wife would leave me, and take our boys away from me because of my mental illness.  My beast was trying to convince me that it would be less painful if that happened, if I was never legally their father anyway.  My beast and I were terrified of losing two of the greatest joys in my life.  And after much therapy, I saw this for what it was.  It was an excuse to stay in that cycle of unworthiness.  By allowing myself to believe that the worst would happen I was perpetuating the model that I had learned and lived - I am not worthy of love - and would punish myself and others because of this.  

As I cried in therapy, literally for the first time after 2 years with my therapist, I realized how much I do love my sons and that I am accountable for my role as their father.  I saw that I must show them that they are truly worthy of love by my choice to adopt them.  That I am choosing them over my own anxiety, fear, feelings of unworthiness, and my beast.  I can model that they deserve to be people who can receive G-d's love and shine it back out into the world.  That their worth is more valuable and precious than anything else to me.  I can give them exactly what I was not given, unconditional, affirming love from a parent who had to make a conscious effort to do so.  I am stronger than my beast and want them to feel that right down to their very cores.  That is what I am accountable for.


So, as I enter the legal and financial process of making our family whole on paper, I am committed to making our family whole in love.  As I break that vicious cycle of pain, suffering, and deconstruction, I find that I can grow as a man, and that I can then help my sons grow into men as well.  Perhaps this is the greatest gift, to be the father I am called to be and choose to be that man, no matter what.  I thank G-d for being a G-d of second, third, fourth, and even hundredth chances.  I thank G-d for the chance to be a part of a real family, created on a foundation of dignity, respect, and worth.  I thank G-d for calling me into choice.

Thank you for being present to my accountability.

Be well, love your neighbor as you love yourself and remember to actually love yourself.

-Ari