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by Katherine Cummings (1995)
I was born eight years ago, when I was fifty-two years old. Not born again; not reborn ...just born. A long gestation period, and a difficult one, full of pain and joy, achievement and failure. I jumped because I was pushed but if I hadn't been pushed I think I would eventually have jumped anyway.
No wonder I adopted the butterfly as my symbol. I emerged from the confining chrysalis of masculinity to be the female person I had always known myself to be, despite years of avoidance, denial and sublimation.
Sometimes my friends tell me the butterfly is inappropriate as a symbol for me, as it is too fragile and delicate (and beautiful?). I always reply that my butterfly has teeth and claws and the will to use them. I thought this was an original conceit of my own until someone sent me a newspaper clipping about a carnivorous South American butterfly that preys on ants. Nature always has the last laugh.
But it isn't easy being a woman without a childhood or teenage years. There is always a sense of something missing, and the mind tries to compensate in strange ways.
Sometimes, with no intent to deceive, I hear myself saying "When I was a little girl, I ..." and I pull myself up and examine this false memory that has been created from my knowledge of other women's childhoods, or from childhoods absorbed from my sister's story books and from my longing from earliest infancy to be female. There is a deep underlying desire in me for a complete life but a complete life is something I will never have. In a way I am lucky that so much of my childhood was spent in other countries as we followed my seafaring father around the world. Later the time came when I set out on my own explorations and divagations. Lacunae are inevitable in any account of my life and there are discrete groups of friends around the world who knew me at different periods of my life and those friends will never know each other. To visit now is to step through windows into chunks and slices of a lifetime which bear no relationship to other chunks and slices. My school friends, my university chums, my Naval comrades, my professional colleagues, my internet contacts... Maybe I will string them all together one day, like a sequence of amber beads through which I can cloudily view the trapped insects, fern leaves and raindrops of my life.
Perhaps the teenage years are hardest to be without. These should have been my apprenticeship years. Years for exploring sexuality and hairstyle; fashion and feminism; music and mankind; a meld of yearning for the security of being younger and impatience for the adventure of being older.... Years for comparing notes with one's peers, experimenting with life, whispering in corners, conspiring behind books. Years for listening to the tribal elders and appearing to scoff and disregard but really storing up their wisdom for the future.
This lack of a teenage may account for the fact that my first few months of life as a woman were overlaid with a desperate attempt to catch up on all the things I had never known and all the experiences I had missed. "Teenager in fast-forward" is sometimes used to describe this phase in transgendered people, and it seems appropriate. I crammed into a few months all the hair, makeup, fashion, sexual politics and social dynamics that other women absorb as teenagers without even realising they are doing it.
Of course I made mistakes. I was past fifty but I desperately wanted to savour the learning years I had never known. My fast-forward efforts resulted in clothing and makeup styles inappropriate to my age and position. My heels were too high, my skirts too narrow, my necklines too low.
I should have known better. If I could blush I would blush.
Can't I blush? Well, I don't blush. It may be due to those years of self-control which trained me to live two lives intermittently and not make inappropriate gestures or respond to the 'wrong' name if I heard it in public. Those years when I lived between genders, sublimating my need to be a woman by playing at it with accommodating friends from time to time.
But I can certainly cry.
For forty years I never cried, but now I break down and sob to racking, hiccuping excess over personal distress; or a friend's unhappiness; or a sentimental passage of music. It must be the hormones. Every transgendered person asked to account for a behavioural quirk says "It's the hormones..."
For two years I lived as a probationary woman, learning to walk, talk, move and gesture all over again ... like the victim of a terrible accident who must learn again how to cope with life; or an amnesia victim painstakingly relearning all the facts she once knew so well, working through the Britannica and able to answer any question as long as it starts with the letters A-D. Next week she will know things starting with A-H...
Learning to live in a gender role is like learning a language. If you do it from infancy it is simple, if you start when you are an adult there is a great deal to unlearn as well as a thousand new things to absorb.
In a way I was the victim of a terrible accident. I was born with XY chromosomes but some unpredictable hormonal wash during pregnancy (the latest theory to account for transgenderism) created a need to be female in the deepest recesses of my psyche.
During my transition time between starting my new life and submitting my body to the surgeon's knife, I was treated with great compassion and understanding by my suburban community, by my profession and by society at large. Only my family failed me, and they were simply demonstrating that problems obey the laws of perspective - up close they look bigger. They had most to lose and probably felt most betrayed by this strange quirk which was in me from birth and which I had suppressed and sublimated for the sake of others for two thirds of my predicted life span. The loss of my wife and two of my three daughters was a tragic experience, but the alternative was suicide and I could not see that as a desirable solution on any terms, mine or theirs. Mind you, I didn't take a vote...
Gradually I became more practised. I dressed more appropriately and stopped buying from charity shops and I learned that a five-minute makeup job is often more suitable for everyday life than a two-hour makeover. Unless I had a reason to 'dress up' I wore jeans and shirts and flat-heeled shoes like other women I knew and I felt myself blending into society in a way which was not only more appropriate but also more comfortable - for me and for society.
And gradually, too, I became more womanly in a physical sense. My hormone replacement therapy changed me. My skin became softer and curves appeared where bones and angles had been before. Some transgendered people have problems with HRT, and complain of side effects ... headaches, nausea, cramps. I never had any side effects. There were noticeable front effects though...
And after two years the day came when I entered St David's Private Hospital for what the authorities call, on the form which lets me have a passport with an 'F' in the gender box, "irreversible gender reassignment surgery."
Did the operation make me a woman?
No.
I have always been a woman. But we all live inside our own heads and I will never know if my XY chromosome self-perception of womanhood is the same as that of XX chromosome women, or for that matter XXY chromosome women (Klinefelter's syndrome) or XXXY chromosome women (Caroline Cossey). But at least the operation made me look more like a woman. I could go to the beach without making painful arrangements to conceal unwanted bits of my anatomy, and I could join other women in the change rooms of gymnasia and aerobics classes without a moment's hesitation or unease on their part or mine.
What is a woman? That is much more difficult to answer, because there are social, legal, grammatical and personal definitions and they tend to change from day to day. Nobody owns a word and sometimes the same word can be used in twenty different ways by twenty different people.
Justice Lockhart of the Federal Court stated in a recent judgement,
"In my opinion, a person who has gender reassignment surgery from male to female is female and a woman, and a person who has had gender reassignment surgery from female to male is male and a man."
Hooray for Justice Lockhart! His statement is not law but it is obiter dicta and could be referred to in any future case where the gender of a post-operative transsexual is to be determined. And it flies in the face of Ormrod J's Corbett v. Corbett ruling, of which more anon.
I was, as I say, well treated by my various communities but were there any noticeable changes in the way I was seen by friends and colleagues? Did I find people treating me differently in my female persona? Were my opinions overridden by men in conversation? Was I patronised by strangers? Was it assumed I was weaker than I had been, that my skill at driving a car was suddenly in question, that my reading tastes had changed?
In some cases this is exactly what happened, although my butterfly would often show its teeth and claws on these occasions. I was upset, however, by the realisation that I had not observed these social handicaps more clearly from the other side of the gender barrier. I had prided myself on treating men and women equally before my transition, yet I found that even my eyes had been clouded by testosterone, and some of my attitudes had bordered on the paternalistic. I try now to make amends by joining in the struggle for recognition of a woman's place as an equal; not a servant, an ornament or a toy.
Oddly enough, some of those who might be assumed to have an interest in elevating women are those who seem to wish to preserve the status quo.
I went to a speech therapist because I was tired of being called 'Sir' on the telephone and she explained that it was not simply a matter of pitch and timbre and vocabulary but also of cadence. "A woman," she explained, "finishes her sentences with a terminal rise."
I could hardly believe my ears. Not only was the terminal rise of fairly recent origin (it did not generally exist when I went away to the United States in 1968 but was firmly entrenched in the schools when I returned in 1973) but it was a speech characteristic I had fought to stamp out in my daughters. The terminal rise seemed to me to be a constant request for affirmation and approval ... a tentative mode of address which virtually sought permission to express an opinion. "Stop asking me questions," I would say to my daughters when their voices rose at the end of each sentence... "Make statements!"
Accordingly I told the speech therapist that the kind of woman I intended to be was not one who constantly sought permission for her opinions. I would be a woman who made statements and would not adopt the terminal rise as a standard feature of my discourse. Nor, I should add, is it a feature in the intonation of the women I admire, women of strength and achievement. So the therapist and I compromised on raising my voice pitch from 90Hz (in the male range) to 150Hz (in the grey area between male and female) and working on timbre ("Talk from behind the facial mask," I was told) and making minor changes in vocabulary. Men and women really do talk slightly different languages. I even compromised on intonation, recognising the truth of the statement that there is more 'light and shade' in women's conversation than in the monotone of men.
I found my memories and attitudes of masculinity gradually being submerged by new perceptions, feelings and attitudes so that second nature became first nature and my former existence became a vagueness which had to be focused on with great concentration before it became a reality ... rather like the formless dreams we try so hard to see clearly before we wake, and which always move beyond the periphery of vision. I knew there had been a person in my former existence, who still loved and wanted his ex-wife and missed his children desperately, yet the perceptions, emotions and experiences of my female persona were starting to overlay the blurring memories of my male self and to achieve the colours and sharp edges of immediacy.
My female self was becoming real life, my male self was becoming a memory.
A quick and stupid assumption holds that a man who becomes a woman does so in order to make love to men. There are all kinds of foolish theories which label transgendered people as homosexuals unable to admit the fact and evading what they see as a stigma by the simple (!) solution of gender reassignment! Since many, even most, transgenders are aware of their gender dysphoria in infancy this seems like a far-fetched notion. That a four year old can be aware enough of sexuality and the differences between genders to settle monomaniacally on a course which will allow him or her to grow up and make love to her/his own gender by way of surgical intervention is rather too foolish to countenance.
Unfortunately one of the foolish people who held this view of transgenderism was Justice Ormrod, who presided over Corbett v. Corbett (1969) in which April Ashley's husband Arthur Corbett sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that April Ashley was born male. This was the first test in a British court of the right of a transsexual to marry. Ormrod ruled that April Ashley was male despite her reassignment and Corbett v. Corbett has laid its dead hand on British and Australian law affecting transsexuals ever since. Recent correspondence from Ormrod to an Australian jurist currently carrying out a study on the place of transsexuals in society has demonstrated Ormrod's total lack of understanding of gender dysphoria as he maunders on about how satisfactory anal sex is and wonders that anyone would want a vagina in order to have sex.
I became quite choleric when I read this correspondence and wrote a sharp series of comments to my jurist friend. Very few of us seek gender reassignment in order to go to bed with men. We seek reassignment for our own peace of mind, and the thought of anal sex would be repugnant to many. The thought of going through life with male genitals would be totally insupportable to virtually all. How could we bear to look at ourselves every day, half and half parodies of humanity, female above, male below?
So then, what of my own sexuality? I am what I call a 'second wave' transsexual ... one who fought to suppress my gender dysphoria and tried to live as others wanted me to be. For a third of my life I lived to please my parents. Then I married (thinking this might redeem me from my mad desire to be female), raised three lovely daughters and finally gave way (after some negative familial coercion) to my need to be a woman, finally and forever. 'First wave' transsexuals, like April Ashley and Caroline Cossey, move across the gender border much earlier in their lives and live virtually their whole adult lives in the female role (I hope female-to-male transsexuals who read this account will forgive my concentration on my own situation and not theirs. It becomes insupportably complex to frame every sentence to cover both sides of the mirror-image). It is 'first-wave' transsexuals who are most likely to want sex with men. Those of us who follow later in life more often than not retain our original sexual orientation. I sometimes say that my surgeon made me into a lesbian...
My surgical reassignment did not affect my love for my family. I would have returned to my wife on almost any terms ... as lover, as best friend, as roommate... But her repugnance for my condition was such that she first divorced me, then sought annulment of our marriage.
The annulment is a story in itself. I had assumed the Catholic Church might have moved into the Twentieth Century in terms of understanding of the human psyche, but in fact the Catholic Tribunal which controlled our annulment was as cruel, dishonest and secretive as the Spanish Inquisition. Evidence was called but never shown to the parties to the annulment, so that nothing could be challenged, and I was never allowed to hear any of the deliberations, although I requested this right. All evidence was written up in the judgement without attribution so that it was effectively anonymous. I was allowed to see the judgement only after the Tribunal had ruled in favour of annulment and my appeal against that ruling had been dismissed. The judgement was full of lies and irrelevancies, including the evidence from some unidentified person that when I cross-dressed it was in order to be attractive to men. A blatant lie. It was suggested that I owned 135 pairs of shoes, making me the Imelda Marcos of Balmain. Another lie, but even if true, what possible relevance did it have to the moment of marriage, the only moment which is relevant in an annulment proceeding? The grounds given for annulment were that I had shown Gross Lack of Discretion in marrying. If this means anything in the English language it means that I should have realised when I took my marriage vows that twenty-three years later I would be forced by circumstance into leaving the marriage and seeking gender reassignment. How foolish of me not have known that!
Incidentally my attempts to have Civil Liberties lawyers take on the Catholic Church in defence of my rights have failed miserably. Letters have not been answered, telephone calls not returned. They couldn't be running scared just because I want them to sue the Pope, surely? Even my butterfly has sharper teeth than they.
I have said in another place that gender dysphoria is a medical condition (if it is not, why is it treated by the medical profession ... psychiatrists and surgeons?). Yet we are treated as if we make a wilful choice to endure all the pain and expense; as if transsexualism were a whim, or a hobby, or a sexual perversion.
I was left in a limbo of loving. Still wanting my wife, still missing my children. One of my daughters stood by me. The other two didn't want to know me. For five years I stood aloof from the world of sex, hoping against hope that my wife would wake up one morning to a new realisation of my worth, and return to me. I admit my hopes were eroded by her marriage to the Catholic who had been the instigator of the annulment...
Incidentally, although I had certainly not sought gender reassignment in the hope of having sex with a man, or men, I never denied that this was a possibility. I had no real idea how much difference might be wrought on my libido by my regimen of hormones, nor did I know what social and psychological changes might occur in my life. So I did not rule out the possibility that Mr Right would come along and sweep me off my feet like the recycled virgin I was. The closest I ever came to this was when a Telecom technician young enough to be my son accosted me in a bookshop and asked me what I was doing next. I was rather fetchingly dressed in a peasant blouse, straight skirt and high heels (during my fast-forward period) but I stammered something about going back to work and scuttled away as fast as I could, skirt and heels notwithstanding.
Then one day I took a closer look at my empty emotional life and admitted that my wife would never come back to me, even if her despicable husband were somehow removed from the scene, and I should stop moping and think about the rest of my life. I should no longer reject the idea of finding a new partner.
No sooner had I made this decision than someone came into my life, almost miraculously, following a series of coincidences which would be laughed off the stage as the most blatant use of deus ex machina. I found myself in the company of an intelligent, witty, warm and wonderful woman who shared many of my literary enthusiasms and enjoyed my company. Within a few weeks I had declared my love for her, and, although she was startled at my boldness, she had the grace to take me seriously (she was not a lesbian before I knew her) and we commenced a close and loving relationship which endured for a year. It might well have endured longer had she not remembered one day that she is heterosexual and we parted tearfully, but lovingly, and are still close friends.
I was still not convinced I was a lesbian, and was prepared to seek out a partner first and find out his or her sex later. I have never been sex mad. I would rather have fine food than sex and good conversation than either.
I also had a brief fling with a pre-operative transsexual during a trip I took through the United States. This turned out to be a one-way relationship and foundered when we parted, although I had never intended it to be a one-week stand. "Aha!," I hear Fred Nile crying triumphantly, "so she is a homosexual by her own admission! Oops! I mean his own admission!"
Sorry, Fred. As far as I am concerned, my partner in the States is a woman, just as I was a woman long, long before surgery, so the most I will confess to is that we were lesbians... But I'm sure that will do, Fred. Damnation is damnation, after all. If you believe in that sort of thing...
And when I came back to Australia, having been rejected by my American playmate, I found myself drifting into a closer and closer relationship with a wonderful pre-op woman who shares many of my interests, including that of writing. She is a published author of many books, and an independent spirit of great courage and physical beauty. There is an age discrepancy between us but there has been an almost identical discrepancy in all three of my post-marital recent relationships, and since I intend to live for ever this hardly matters.
My lover is undergoing a lot of cruel flak from her family who see me as a kind of Svengali, luring my partner to the surgical table, and blandly overlook the fact that I would never have met her if she had not been already well down the track to St David's.
And so my life proceeds. I have written one full-length autobiography (which I am proud to say won the Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction in 1992) and yet so much has happened since then that I feel I should add a lengthy epilogue before it appears again. I closed off my book in the belief that I could never love again. How wrong I was! And I have also discovered the internet and am in contact with some hundreds of intelligent, articulate transsexuals and transgendered people in several different countries. From them I have learned a great deal I never knew, for I found my way down the difficult path of transsexualism virtually alone, forming my own opinions and accepting the strictures of the medical profession as if they really knew something. I have modified many of my opinions since I wrote my autobiography and will probably continue to do so. What has emerged most clearly is the primitive stage Australia occupies in recognition of the legal and human rights of transsexuals. We cringingly follow Corbett v. Corbett, ignoring the many attacks made by sensible members of the legal profession on the narrow-minded bigotry of Ormrod J. and we fail to understand that the major question is not "Why should transsexuals be accorded the same rights as anyone else?" but rather "Why should transsexuals not be accorded the same rights as everyone else?" Who would be harmed if we were permitted to marry in our gender of choice? Who would suffer if we could have our documentation altered to conform to our new personae? The dead hand of religion imposes laws dreamed up by timorous Middle Eastern nomads afraid of thunderstorms and earthquakes three thousand years ago and we do not have the moral courage to discard superstitions which should no longer have anything to do with modern societal rules.
I do what I can, as an XY woman. I write to politicians. I speak at gender conferences. I write for publication. I stand up to be counted. I do not expect to make much difference in my lifetime, but we have to start somewhere. Gender reassignment surgery is just over forty years old (Christine Jorgensen's operation in 1952 was the first successful one to be publicised). In that time remarkable progress has been made in recognising legal and human rights of transsexuals particularly in Holland, some of the Scandinavian countries and parts of the United States and Canada. Why is Australia so backward? I realise the Liberals blame the National Party, but that can't be the whole story, surely. Why should wide hats and narrow minds disadvantage a whole innocent sub-group of society who want nothing more than to get on with their reordered lives?
Of course there are good people (like my jurist friend) working for more humane treatment of transsexuals in Australia. With luck this account of the brief life and unexpected loves of an XY woman may inform a few more lay people, as my earlier autobiography did.
It has been a remarkable eight years for me, since first I wrote to my colleagues at the college where I worked, telling them what I intended to do with my life, or what was left of it.
It has been such an adventure that I sometimes tell my friends I have a mind to go back the other way, just for the interest and the challenge.
Ah, well. Maybe not.
Once may be enough.
This essay is made available with the very kind permission of Kate Cummings, the author of Katherine's Diary. (And thanks to Katie W. for getting an electronic copy to me! -- Lisa)
Copyright by the author: Kate Cummings / kcummings@firstnet.com.au
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