A Simple Way to Understand "Transgender"

"It's all in your head," your  mom or dad or friend or clergyman says about your being transgender.  And they are right.

Consider the experience of pain.  You might say, "My foot hurts."  Can you prove it?  There may be verifiable physical evidence, a cut, a bruise, a damaged muscle, but not all pain has an obvious physical cause.  Yet you know your foot hurts.  Someone might tell you "It's all in your head", meaning "You are imagining the pain."  You are unlikely to grant this possibility.

It is the same with one's subjective experience of gender.  I know I am a man, but anyone inspecting my physiology would conclude otherwise.  The same people who would accept my assertion that my foot hurts will reject my assertion that I am and always have been male.  Why?  Probably at least in part because others can't see how the wrapper, the body, can be anything other than what it looks like.  However, there is a simple explanation.

Let's go back to the topic of pain.  When you feel pain you can identify its location, but it is because the painful nerves communicate their distress to your brain.  The pain is experienced in the brain but identified as to its location.  The brain tracks ever thing, and that includes one's sense of oneself.

There's a good reason why someone's brain might identify the person as one gender rather than another.  Hormones play an essential role in whether an embryo develops into a boy body or a girl body, but that's not the end of the story.  There are later hormone flows that affect other stages in develp,ent.  More and mre researchers are identifying the flood of gender hormones at the point the brain begins to grow as a possible source for why someone is transgender.  If, for instance, in my case, the flow of female hormones caused me to be biologically female, it was the flow of male hormones at the point of my brain's growth that made my brain male and to have male structures and characteristics.  You can read more about this at GID Info:
http://www.hemingways.org/GIDinfo/research.htm .

How can you get your head around the a person having a female body and a male brain or vice versa?    Try this.  You've seen movies or TV shows where a mad scientist or pioneering surgeon exchanges two people's brains.  There is an episode of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND with that very theme.  Ginger's mind is transmitted into the brawny henchman's head and Mary Ann has the Professor's in hers, etc.  .

Episode The Friendly Physician

Let me ask you, which of the two was Mary Ann and which the Professor?  It may have looked like Mary Ann but it talked, acted and thought like the Professor.  If you and another person swapped brains, you, your personality, memories, thoughts, would go where your brain went.  It would not matter what other people who saw you and your former body asserted.  They would only see what you formerly saw in the mirror.  They would not see what you perceive as YOU.  This makes the whle accusation "It's all in your mind" rather meaningless.

Now imagine that instead of undergoing an operation or mad scientist mind transference you had been born with that other body.  That's what it is to be transgender.  Your mind is in the wrong body.    What if Ginger had been forced to remain  in the brawny henchman's body.  Do you think that may have caused her a great deal of stress?  Could she survive that trauma?  Could she be expected to, as a former friend said to me abuot top surgery, keep what she was born with, the large rather uncouth male body of the henchmqan?  Of course not.  And that's why given that my brain is Christopher I need to change my body, to make Nan's female body match Christoper's brain.  Ginger had to count on the mind transference gizmo, as she had no way to alter her body back to it's radically different shape.  I don't have any diabolical mad scientist machine to put my mind in a more compatible body, but unlike Ginger, I can modift the one I have.

One more point -- plenty of people will deny that the brain is where our identity resides.  In fact, in earlier times and other cultures the seat of the self was and is identified as variously the heart, the Third Eye, and othjer body parts no doubt.  Our language shows that the brai, or more specifically the mind is situated in our heads.  You have no doubt heard some say "That guy is out of his mind!"  I sincerely doubt you have ever heard someone described as being out of his elbow.

When you have to explain what it means to be transgender to someone perhaps you might want to hold off on the more clinical or academic explanations and simply allude to the hormone flood determining the gender of the brain and then sit them down to watch GILLIGAN'S ISLAND.

You can contact Christopher Hawthorne Moss at https://www.facebook.com/kitmoss2012 .

The Year It All Changed

2012. 

I was already a mess when it started.  My gender dysphoria was well underway.  I just didn't know that was what was making me so miserable.  How did it manifest?  I was reading all this gay male historical fiction.  Tons of it.  Being historical, the books took place mostly in times when being lovers could get a couple men seriously killed.  Love stories are often full of angst anyway... this was desperate angst.  I was starting to get shaky, stopped being able to read these unhappy tales.

The day after Christmas my lesbian sister came for a visit.  It was not much fun.  She was impatient and judgmental, plus she sat and checked her text messages frequently.  But in the conversations she and I had between her glances at her phone we touched on a topic I had just been developing some new thoughts that surprised me.  I was becoming impatient with women.  My sister's experience with the woman she was pursuing speaked the conversation.  She was frustrated with the woman's changeable attitudes towards a relatioonship.  While heretofore I would not have even entertained the thought that there might be a tendency for female culture to exhibit unpleasant common characteristics, I found myself complaining that so many women were so unable to know their own minds.  I was astonished.  We had a very unpleasant parting, not something I ultimately regret, but it set me on uneven emotional ground about the same time I turned 60.

Or more uneven, since things were already askew in a relationship I'd struggled with for about a year, that being with members of the online group Speak Its Name (SiN) and in particular it's founder who calls herself Erastes.  My therapist has an explanation now of why this woman and I never could get along.  Of course this is based mostly on m y account, but I did share some emails from Erastes with her, so she may be right.  She sees SiN as a little fiefdom and Erastes as a very jealous dictator.  She said the problem I have coming into groups with that sort of structure is that I have tons of energy and am generous with it and I threaten the hell out of people like Erastes.  What I had assumed was Cross-Pond communications problems was less me and more Erastes and her cronies, namely Lee Rowan.

To be fair, I found Erastes rules for posting on her group and site rather inflexible, and heaven knows I not only know better but am in no way tolerant of such heavy-handedness.

From November through December of 2011 I had taken on reading and reviewing books for the SiN web site/blog.  Erastes seemed to like two things about my work.. the honesty and the volume.  It happens that I also admire her willingness to say when a book is actually bad.  I was turning out the reviews quickly and quality reviews they were, nine of them in six weeks.  But apparently I communicated too much or wrongly, since she fired me for being too much of a hassle to deal with.

Now for the explanation of the movie poster.  I sat down one evening in January 2012 to watch the movie "Maurice".  Bear the end of the movie the character Clive is shown looking wistfully out his wife's and his bedroom window, imagining Maurice smiling and waving at him.  The look on Clive's face, the terribly wistfulness and pain, really hit me hard.  After the movie I went upstairs and found that Erastes had canned me as a reviewer.  I was stunned.  I began to cry, not something I do often, and cried off and on for a few days.  After those days I became anxious, depressed, had panic attacks, was nearly homebou7nd with agoraphobia-like symptoms.

I did not even begin to come out  of this misery until July.

Gender Odyssey logo

Now, having read the aboveI of this post, you might well ask, just what the hell has this all to do with being transgender?  Especially all that stuff with Clive and Maurice.  Well, read on.

About a month after the blowup with Erastes and SiN, I happe3ned to go to my neighbors' to drop off a birthday present for their second eldest son.  The wife, Danna, asked me if I was feeling any urges to go to church, since she had her prayer group praying for me.  I told her her church's attitude towards gay rights would make that impossible3.  That is when her husband, Leonard, lit into me with a string of aggressively delivered idiotic questions and objections to gay rights, everything from his conviction that gay people are sick more than straight, asking me if there were gay sharks (and not listening to my answer), and "What's next?  What if I want to marry my cat?" (and not listening to my answer, "No, because a cat can't consent.")

Following this my friends Suzanne told me she was opposed to gay marriage as well.

With these two encounters I got even worse.  I would have panic attacks when away from home.  (I still can't hear slow, sad songs in supermarkets.)  I decided I needed safe space and started going to the Everett/Snohomish PFLAG.  That is when  two things started to happen, healing and acquisition of the key to my unhappiness.  I owe this group of people a great deal for the grip on sanity I now can reach for.  Their affirmation and support mattered, but as it turns out, so did being introduced to the concepts, not exactly new to me but unexamined, of people who are transgender.

At the Gay Pride parade in June, I told my PFLAG friend Maggie that I felt more like a gay man than a gay woman.  POW!  That was it.  Not only have I never been a lesbian, though that seemed the only explanation for my feelings in my early twenties, but I am also not a straight woman.  I am a gay man!  That explains so much, as I will explain in a future post.  At the next PFLAG meeting I came out as Kit.  Within a week I had told my SO.  Within a couple more weeks I had the exceedingly well-timed opportunity to attend the Gender Odyssey conference.  At that conference I found my "kind".  I never felt so at home in my entire life.  An d I was learning the key to so much of my own experience.

Interestingly Erastes reared her head to chime in on this new awareness of my identity.  She tweeted that if Kit Moss was a pen name, which indeed it started out as, I should not pretend to be a man, that it would not serve me well as an author of M/M romance.  I had realized by then that I am a man, and I said so.  I don't know and don't care what she thought of that.

How my SO and others and I myself adjust to this new understanding, the awareness of my identity as a gay man, is for other later posts.  But all this, from the anxiety reading the historical novels and up until and including now is what my therapist tells me is called gender dysphoria, the point at which the incongruity of one's biological sex and mental and emotional gender reach a breaking point. 

The scene with Clive?  Recently I was thinking about this and realized that what I was seeing on Clive's face was what I myself was feeling.  His wistfulness and regret, that of a man who has made his bed and now must lie in it, with a bed mate not his right one, was my own grief over 60 years as the real me lost.  As it happens, I am much luckier than Clive.  At least my bedfellow is the sex and gender where my affectional preference lies.

Thus Kit saw the light of day for the first time, Nan started to fade back into memory, and the amalgam that is Me began to coalesce.  hail Atlantis!

I was already a mess when it started.  My gender dysphoria was well underway.  I just didn't know that was what was making me so miserable.  How did it manifest?  I was reading all this gay male historical fiction.  Tons of it.  Being historical, the books took place mostly in times when being lovers could get a couple men seriously killed.  Love stories are often full of angst anyway... this was desperate angst.  I was starting to get shaky, stopped being able to read these unhappy tales.

The day after Christmas my lesbian sister came for a visit.  It was not much fun.  She was impatient and judgmental, plus she sat and checked her text messages frequently.  But in the conversations she and I had between her glances at her phone we touched on a topic I had just been developing some new thoughts that surprised me.  I was becoming impatient with women.  My sister's experience with the woman she was pursuing speaked the conversation.  She was frustrated with the woman's changeable attitudes towards a relatioonship.  While heretofore I would not have even entertained the thought that there might be a tendency for female culture to exhibit unpleasant common characteristics, I found myself complaining that so many women were so unable to know their own minds.  I was astonished.  We had a very unpleasant parting, not something I ultimately regret, but it set me on uneven emotional ground about the same time I turned 60.

Or more uneven, since things were already askew in a relationship I'd struggled with for about a year, that being with members of the online group Speak Its Name (SiN) and in particular it's founder who calls herself Erastes.  My therapist has an explanation now of why this woman and I never could get along.  Of course this is based mostly on m y account, but I did share some emails from Erastes with her, so she may be right.  She sees SiN as a little fiefdom and Erastes as a very jealous dictator.  She said the problem I have coming into groups with that sort of structure is that I have tons of energy and am generous with it and I threaten the hell out of people like Erastes.  What I had assumed was Cross-Pond communications problems was less me and more Erastes and her cronies, namely Lee Rowan.

To be fair, I found Erastes rules for posting on her group and site rather inflexible, and heaven knows I not only know better but am in no way tolerant of such heavy-handedness.

From November through December of 2011 I had taken on reading and reviewing books for the SiN web site/blog.  Erastes seemed to like two things about my work.. the honesty and the volume.  It happens that I also admire her willingness to say when a book is actually bad.  I was turning out the reviews quickly and quality reviews they were, nine of them in six weeks.  But apparently I communicated too much or wrongly, since she fired me for being too much of a hassle to deal with.

Now for the explanation of the movie poster.  I sat down one evening in January 2012 to watch the movie "Maurice".  Bear the end of the movie the character Clive is shown looking wistfully out his wife's and his bedroom window, imagining Maurice smiling and waving at him.  The look on Clive's face, the terribly wistfulness and pain, really hit me hard.  After the movie I went upstairs and found that Erastes had canned me as a reviewer.  I was stunned.  I began to cry, not something I do often, and cried off and on for a few days.  After those days I became anxious, depressed, had panic attacks, was nearly homebou7nd with agoraphobia-like symptoms.

I did not even begin to come out  of this misery until July.

Continues.Christopher Mosshttps://plus.google.com/1155314692559960418220

Trans Teen in Charlotte Runs for Homecoming King

Blake Brockington has spent the better part of two years winning over the respect of students, faculty, and administrators at his school. Now, he looks to cap his high school tenure by running for homecoming king.

BY Parker Marie Molloy

February 07 2014 1:25 PM ET

Blake Brockington

A 17-year-old high school student in Charlotte, N.C., received some great news earlier this week. Blake Brockington, a transgender senior, has been nominated for homecoming king at East Mecklenburg High School.

"I honestly feel like this is something I have to do," Brockington told QNotes, hoping that in addition to taking home the crown, he can raise transgender awareness.

Brockington's coming out has been a bumpy ride, and included setbacks such as his father's rejection of his identity, and taunting from other students. Now, less than two years later, he has earned the respect of his fellow students.

The homecoming king will be determined by which student can raise the most money for Mothering Across Continents, an international nonprofit with plans to build a school in South Sudan.
As Brockington told QNotes, "Nobody should be scared to be themselves, and everybody should have an equal opportunity to have an enjoyable high school experience." He hopes to claim victory, in part to inspire younger trans students, including several he mentors.

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of transgender students becoming involved in homecoming and prom court-related events. In October, a New Hampshire trans student was elected homecoming king, and just a month earlier, Cassidy Lynn Campbell of Huntington Beach, Calif., was elected homecoming queen.

That doesn't mean there aren't still trouble spots, however. Last September, a Johnstown, Penn., student was blocked from being put on the ballot for homecoming king at his school. Kasey Caron, a 17-year-old transgender boy, was told by school administrators that while he was welcome to run for homecoming queen, he would not be allowed to run for homecoming king on account of his transgender status.

Reprinted without permission from ADVOCATE.

Review of BEAUTIFUL MUSIC FOR UGLY CHILDREN by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

BEAUTIFUL MUSIC FOR UGLY CHILDREN

By Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Reviewed by Christopher Hawthorne Moss

Buy on Amazon.com

Gabe Williams has found his niche, his love for music, fed by the support and resources of John, a pioneer rock DJ, having led him to create a late night community radio program he calls “Beautiful Music for Ugly Children.”  He discovers quickly that he is darn good at broadcasting and that he has a devoted fan club.  The only hitch is that his fans, mostly from his own high school, know him as Liz.  Will they still like him and his show when they find out he is transgender?  Will his family and closest friends accept him with the authentic identity he has embraced?  Using recording industry terminology, he calls his female identity his “A side” after the better known song on a 45 RPM.  His “B side” is who he really is and wants to present to the world.  He quips “Show us your B side!” and starts a movement of self-expression in his town.

As his fandom of “Ugly Children” grows and participates in weekly stunts, he fears being outed as that girl Liz in school.  Inevitably a fellow student makes him and spreads the word.  Along with support, Gabe starts getting threats that culminate in an act of violence that affects one of his dearest friends.  He starts to wonder whether he can be himself in the world he lives in. 

Gabe is entirely believable, neither two dimensional nor needlessly complex.  His friends and family ring true as well, and, horrifying though the memories are, life in high school with all its social strata and expectations.

First let me tell you that, as a transman myself, pretty much everything Gave experiences was absolutely what I have, in spite of the fact I’m an old man now at 61.  Our only real difference beyond age is that Gabe loves women, while I am a gay transman.  Oh, and I have never seriously contemplated suicide.  Lucky for me, since I didn’t have a best friend like Gabe’s to talk me out of it.  But Gabe’s attempts to get recognition from family, schoolmates and friends is familiar to me, as is the  mixed bag of clothing choices – yes, men’s clothes are more comfortable, but not so much the chest binder a transman wears.  Just how to be yourself after years of conditioning as someone quite other is a big challenge.

Any lover of rock music will love the book.  Gabe and his hero John are experts on the subject, and as an old radio fan it was a joy to listen to the recording industry and broadcasting lore.  It was all quite familiar and dead on accurate as far as I could verify.

This is easily my favorite novel about a contemporary transman so far.  It is just such a professional job of composition and execution and so full of authenticity.  It’s also fun to read, though with tense moments.

“Tell us about your B side!”

How I Performed a Sex Change on a Novel and Why I Won’t Do It Again

Reprinted from Rob Colton's blog.

By Christopher Hawthorne Moss, author of BELOVED PILGRIM and WHERE MY LOVE LIES DREAMING

Well, you see, it’s like this.  I published a novel in 2011 titled BELOVED PILGRIM about a young noblewoman who disguises herself as a man and goes to the Crusades as a knight.  I have told every Tom, Dick and Mary that I wrote it for the chance to write a female character with other concerns in her life than what particular shade of purple brocade she would wear to the ball.  Even more than that I did not want to write about a woman who did, in fact, wear armor and fight but winds up giving it all up for her Knight in Shining Armor. He’s going to want that armor back, without the breastplate stretched out all funny like you did his football jersey.   Since Shaw already handle Saint Joan, I came up with Elisabeth von Winterkirche.  Thanks to portraying her as a lesbian, I was able to accomplish two thing, to make sure no knights in shining armor would make her trade her Crusader’s capa for an apron and to make my lesbian friends happy.  Though not a lesbian myself, I was pretty pleased with the result, the first edition of BELOVED PILGRIM.  I had written a female character I could.. mostly… relate to.

Chapter Two – January of 2012 found me going through a most confusing period full of anxiety and depression and even agoraphobia.   I had started reading virtually nothing but gay romance, historical to be exact, which is a prescription for depression all by itself.  I mean, you can’t fall in love with these characters and then daily see their most essential happiness threatened, pretty much the standard plot of all gay historical fiction.  The key moment in this period was watching the film version of E. M. Forster’s MAURICE.  It fell neatly into that same depressing pattern, but not more than usual.  Until that one scene at the end, where Maurice waves goodbye to Clive and runs to join Alex in the boathouse, and Clive stands in the window gazing after him.  In that moment I froze and didn’t come out of my funk until seven months later when I came out as transgender at a monthly PFLAG meeting.  I had come to realize that what I had been experiencing was gender dysphoria, a highly painful feeling of being in the wrong sex body.  When I saw Clive’s face, you see, I saw myself, a man, gazing at a life I had not realized.  That though born with a female body, my heart and mind were and always had been male.  No real surprise, if you had watched me grow up.  I was never a tomboy, but as I once told the Peppermint Patty in our small town, I was a Thomas Gentleman.
Don’t worry, there is beginning to be all kinds of science about this.  I didn’t make it up.

To make a long story short, it occurred to me now that the female character I could relate to in BELOVED PILGRIM was actually a woman who was really a man.  A female bodied man, a transman, and FTM.  So, I wondered, should I rewrite my novel to allow Elisabeth to be Elias? What a job!  Maybe I should just drop it.  But I was no more going to drop that than my own gender transition, as hard as that is.

I should say at this point that I used the expression “sex change” in the title of this article with tongue firmly planted in cheek.  The expression is not used any more.  The expression for taking hormones and having your bits reengineered is SRS, sexual reassignment surgery.  It sounds like when I showed up in the registrar’s office they accidentally assigned me to the wrong classes or workplace.  Now it was up to me to go back there and either demand my money back or for a more suitable assignment.  Since both my parents are dead, it made more sense to avoid probate and just get the right sex assignment.

Changing what gender you are is a misnomer.  You have come to recognize that while the bits are female, the noggin is male.  The ticker too.  It’s as if your brain had been implanted in someone else’s body.  It’s still you, even though you look like Mrs. Somethingorother, or in a transwoman’s case, Mr. Somethignoteother.  What you are doing in your new assignment is trying to make the bod and brain match.  You take hormones.  You might have your breasts lopped off, or in the other case, something else situated lower.  You change your name and clothing and pronouns.

Speaking of pronouns, it is high time we got back to the book, you know, the one I wrote about the lesbian.  How was I going to take an already quite complete and coherent, IMHO, novel.  How to change Elisabeth into a dude.  Could it be as easy as using my nifty little technique of “Find and Replace”?!  All I needed to do was use “Find” to locate every incident of “she” and with an S-ectomy turn them into “he”?  You are probably way ahead of me here.  What happens if you do this without specifying “Whole Words Only”?  You get a lot of words that start with “she-” losing the S even when it appears in the middle of the word: “sheet” is “heet”, “disheveled” is “disheveled”,   Once you start over and make sure only the simple “she” is selected, you suddenly remember that the female character you changing into a transman was not the only female character in the book.. now suddenly they are all male.  Back to the drawing board.  Don’t forget “she” included in contractions, or other pronouns like “her” and “hers”.  Then you start on the easy stuff, names.  But wait, Elisabeth takes her brother’s name, and in the book you only know it’s the former female called Elias because of all the female pronouns used fr her, um, him, and you just changed them all.

Lest you imagine this takes care of the problem, at least eventually, there is the issue of certain terms that imply that the formerly-female Elias is somehow masquerading.  You know, like “masquerade”, “disguise”, that sort of thing.  I just noticed one “guise” slipped in, or rather stayed stuck in.  By all rights Elias should have ripped Albrecht a new one for insinuating, by the use of that term, that she , um, he is not actually a man…  Even saying “swearing like a  man” would be offensive.  Yes, even in the 12^th century.  Of course, this leads to the realization, at long last, that changing gender is no easy task.  I did not start my transition with a simple “Find and Replace”.

The subtler aspects are an education unto themselves.  You learn your own engrained biases when you look through a novel about a woman and change it to a man.  You discover plenty of ways you interpreted what is female, even if you meant the character to be more enlightened.  That is, incidentally, why, in part, that it took me 60 years to get to the understanding of myself that I did.  I kept insisting to myself and anyone else who would hold still for the harangue that deep down inside there was no difference between men and women.  It was all cultural.  So why then did insisting I was 100% enlightened female didn’t stop me from freaking out at the dysphoria?  You learn quickly how you sculpt your cultural biases into your story.  C’mon, admit it, at least in other people’s books.  Only with them you can call it literary criticism.

In sum, it was a real bear to make BELOVED PILGRIM into a novel about a transgender character.  I’ve noticed in other novels about transmen or transwoman that it is very hard to either understand or communicate that those years of being in the wrong body mean that you can’t just change your pronouns.. and you can’t write a story about a transgender person by doing no more than writing a character who behaves like one gender but obliquely refers to the dissonance of having the wrong body.  You still have that body and the world will still relate to you based on that body.  And you will know that every second of the rest of your life unless you had an amazing plastic surgeon.  Even then you will have a tough time.  As I like to reassure people, no one seeks to live as “the other” sex on a whim.  Why do we still do it?  We don’t all.  Just those of us who feel our gender is to large a Truth to try to hide.

Why won’t I ever perform a “sex change” on a book?  You might think it’s because it was a hairy lot of labor, but that’s not it.  It’s because I don’t intend to write any more books about women who really are, down deep inside, dudes.  Period.
 

BELOVED PILGRIM

http://harmonyinkpress.com/coming-soon-beloved-pilgrim-by-christopher-hawthorne-moss/