Feeling good, feeling hope, feeling focussed

It’s three months tomorrow , thirteen weeks today, since I started testosterone. So much has happened to me and it has to be said it has been tough for me so far. But things are beginning to level out for now. I have done a three part vlog update on my Youtube channel MrStubborndog and it definitely feels like I am turning a corner and growing in confidence again finally now. It is quite possible that the internal hormonal battle is easing up now my T levels are taking effect. I haven’t had a bleed now in 5 weeks and my cycle has been 24-5 days for many years now so I KNOW that is a change and a very welcome one at that!!

In these vlogs I talk about some of the physical changes I have seen, the shifts and changes in my mood and patience levels. I speak about leaving my job and the prospect of reinventing the professional me as a now qualified counsellor who is actively seeking to get back emotionally fit to practice. I share my feelings about parenthood and the prospect of seeking a sperm donor in order for us to try and conceive a child where Carmen will be mum and I will be dad, albeit one that fires invisible blanks I talk about the prospect of using new reproductive technologies for trans-fertility. Lastly I give thanks – to everyone out there, transguys and all for sharing our stories; and a very special thanks to my former workmates at the Youth Offending Service I now used to work for.

Many thanks in advance for watching them, feel free to pass them on to others and also to comment here or on the vid itself. It’s really helpful to get feedback.

Feral Daydreams – a poem

It has been nearly two years since I last wrote a poem. Two years at the end of September. That was a special poem as it was like a diary, recording my growing feelings soon after Carmen and I met and were on our first holiday together in Cornwall. I’ve always written poetry in fits and starts through my life. I have notebooks full of scribbles and musings and I even still have a plastic bag full of the torn remnants of all my pre-1993 poetry. I self-destructed one night after my lover at the time aggressively raged at me for writing a poem to my best friend on her birthday – one day I’ll get the sellotape out and put the pieces together!

This morning after I have written the poem below I began to think about why it is that I have not written for so long. Maybe it is because I have been waiting to find my authentic voice of my core self. My voice has broken and now it is time to sing again maybe. Be warned – my guitar-playing is getting easier now my fingers are stronger so watch out for me doing my version of the easiest song I know how to play, ‘Working Class Hero’ by John Lennon, coming to a YouTube channel near you before too long

I hope you enjoy reading the poem. I keep hearing the stories of other guys as they struggle with T-induced insomnia and other major body shifts. This is how it felt like to me, this morning, in my 12th week of testosterone….

Feral Daydreams

A lone bee busies himself in the lavender

While the blackbirds sing in the morning,

Tunefully sparring from the safety of their trees.

The world is waking again today.

I see it with my night eyes waning

Aware that I will sleep to the rising buzz

That marks the birth of each fresh solar dawn

Like yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Will it always be as this from now?

Upside-down in a non-nocturnal world?

Back-to-front in a land of office hours,

At least in the country I live in.

But I have to sleep when my body tells me.

When the birds and bees start their shifts

Is how it is for now, as I am on bat-time

Until the new me is fully born it seems.

For now I will have one last tea and smoke

Reflecting on the here and now around me.

Before climbing upstairs and into the nest

Nuzzling my mate in slumbering daydreams.

It feels like puberty is feral, a special transition itself,

Where new order emerges from the chaos

Of the shiny and sometimes deadly sharp

Fragments of a former self.

Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.

© Sam Feeney

19 August 2010

Fire in my head

Peyote Ceremony w/prayer stick Spirit shaman is conducting a ceremony over fire with his peyote, prayer stick & candle. 8 X 8"

What is happening to me now feels like a rebirth. I am on the cusp quite literally of beginning my physical somatic transition. Each and every cell in my body will feel the surge of a hormone familiar from childhood and captured ethereally in my masculinity since then. Except that this time I will feel the full flush of pubescent male sexuality. My boy begins his journey into manhood and into hitherto uncharted territories.

It is at one and the same time the biggest and most exciting thing I have been dreaming of for as long as I can remember as well as being, well, scary. My adrenaline is buzzing, my kundalini energy is rising. I am actively hunting and manifesting what I need through my labour. I have plans. Sound plans. Plans that will take me where I want to be. It’s not a million miles from where I am now, there is nothing in the plans that fundamentally changes who and where I am in the world.

What I have learnt so powerfully in recent times is that peace, happiness and joy do not come from trying to battle, stamp on and repress my rage, despair and alienation. Neither do they come from chasing the trends and buying a way into fluffed-up-coziness-with-strokes that would pacify a stressed corpereal corporate being for the weekend.

But I am anxious too. I have built myself up that barring any medical reason why I should not start testosterone, then the gender specialist doctor I am seeing for the second time on Friday will be able to give me my first shot. He has not told me this, I have read it in the paperwork he gave me following my first appointment along with the consent forms, clinical information about hormone therapy etc and my letter to get my documentation changed as far as I can prior to getting a Gender Recognition Certificate. What if I’ve got it wrong? What if, in my eagerness to start, I’ve misunderstood and I arrive on Friday all ready to go and I find out I have to wait some more? I feel really stupid for saying it, when in reality, even if it is NOT possible to get it going on Friday I will survive and just wait a little longer! But I am feeling every hour of every day as one hour closer towards radically changing every cell in my body. It IS a Big Thing. A Big BIG Thing.

I could have 42 hours left before testosterone begins its journey through a needle in my buttock muscle, to be transported by my body’s circulation system to the rest of me. I am intensely curious as to how my brain will first begin to sense the shifting subtle changes that will signal the beginnings of my second puberty. One thing I have been anxious about is how testosterone will affect my emotional expression. It will affect it for sure and I am going to have to re-tune my empathy antennae to these new baseline emotions as I experience them in a new way. I am curious as to how others around me are going to perceive this change in me. I’m letting everyone know NOW that I really do want your feedback on any changes you notice in how you connect with me on a personal and professional level. It will help me learn to tune and fine-tune the empathic kaleidoscope I have collected in my limbic palette of felt emotional expression. Other guys might have all sorts of tools and gadgets in their workshops. My current tool-kit has its sharpest instruments in my relationship and communication skills… and now I’m moving from Venus to Mars I will need to do a full kit inspection and make sure everything is all gleamy, greased up and works fit for its purpose!

So this fire is burning bright in my head* now and my initiation into manhood is taking its next inevitable step. I am hoping deeply that I will be able to sing Happy Birthday to mi chica with a broken voice… squeaky or not…. come her birthday in July. I have my first video blog to do either tonight or tomorrow evening so check out MrStubbornDog on YouTube. I will post a link as soon as he starts howlin’.

Oww..oooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOoo

The Meaning of Life

The simple beauty of the Fibonacci numbers in nature as in this coneflower

I am feeling like a pre-pubescent boy, flushing in anticipation of the rising tide of masculinity that comes with the boost to testosterone which puberty brings. Sometimes I cannot even think straight. I have a lot of adrenaline flowing through me right now, like an energy is rising as I transition. So it has got me thinking all about the meaning of life all over again.

Three massively positive things have happened to me in the weeks since I last wrote on Stubborn Dogs.

The first is that I FINALLY qualified as a therapeutic counsellor after a hard long slog of working out who the hell I am and what I am living this life for? I don’t claim to ever be able to know all of the answers to those questions. But I have grown into my new self as a result of much self-reflection on old patterns of feelings, thoughts and actions and relationships with others. I have also changed aspects of myself I found I wanted to change in this process over the last four and a half years as a result of truly experiencing myself through my relationships with others. Every single person I have connected with along the way, and you all know who you are, has mattered deeply towards my understanding of myself and of my place in the universe around me.

Although for ethical reasons I will be on a break from counselling work until I am stabilised enough on my hormone therapy and have worked through any issues of ‘fitness to practice’ in clinical supervision, I am actively researching my areas of interest and preparing for client work in the future. I will also be developing some educational workshops and trainings around working with gender diversity, as well as other areas of interest. I am working with my friend Claire on developing a new website so it’s watch this space about my services available soon. Any editors out there, I’m also in the market for any publishing opportunities too… so drop me a line if you’re interested!

The second brilliant thing is that I have also had my first appointment with a private gender specialist in London who has taken me on as a patient while I wait for the NHS wheels to slowly grind and catch up with where I am in my transition. Luckily my GP is ace and is backing me all the way, but I need to get a prescription initiated by a specialist first so unless I am prepared to wait an unknown but lengthy period of time and continue to struggle with dsyphoric feelings, thoughts and behaviours which impact on my mental health, I NEED to pay for it. It works out about the cost of a budget holiday so it’s a no-brainer for me. I have my blood and liver function tests to be done on Tuesday and I am booked in after the results come back for my second appointment for next payday! I am so hoping I might get my first shot then, all things being ok. If that’s the case then I might only have twelve more sleeps left until I can feel like my body is beginning it’s biggest transition since the last time it hit puberty which was the wrong one and was a disaster. My boy will begin his physical journey to manhood at last and soon I will start to talk like a man too. I’m curious about how it will affect me individually. I have excellent empathic awareness right now and my emotional expression is full and expressive. Testosterone will affect this and I will have to learn new ways of dealing with this. I am already learning to ‘tone down’ my non-verbal and tactile communication with men I meet in casual encounters!

The third thing is an existential dilemma posed to me by a Facebook friend, Kate, who is a Christian lesbian and who sometimes speaks at church services. Kate was preparing a sermon on what god looks like and had asked her FB friends to share their thoughts with her. Kate is cunning like that, getting her mates to write a stunning sermon for her! They’ll fall for it every time

Now I, like any good revolutionary marxist, am an atheist. I do not worship any god, or any goddess for that matter, and am resolutely opposed to religious dogma that keeps the masses in their place in fear of divine retribution and going against the patriarchal authority on high. But like every human being, I have my contradictions, and one of these is that I can simultaneously be an unequivocal atheist as well as having a shamanic spirituality. I rationalise it intellectually by appreciating the weirdness of quantum phenomena and the vast forces, energies and masses that form our known (and even unknown) universe(s). I don’t expect any one at all to share my beliefs, I just find they help me ground myself in this brief existance I will have on this Earth…well, until the next one comes around maybe lol

But yesterday, on top of all the stupendous emotional peaks and troughs I have been walking through in recent weeks and months, I had a brush with death. Well, both me and my girlfriend had a brush with our mortality to be precise when an idiot stopped dead on a fast A-road without indicating, and after a bend, and I had to perform an emergency stop at 60mph without losing control of the car. Luckily, I have once performed this driving manoevre about thirteen years ago when I did my advanced driver training while working on London Ambulances. Luckily, body memory works. Luckily we did not have someone driving behind us. Somehow, someway it worked and we are alive and my car is in one piece.

Later on we were watching a cracking FA Cup Final where my girlfriend’s Chelsea boys beat Pompey, and there was a thud on the conservatory window and I caught sight of a bird drop to the ground. I went out and found a greenfinch out sparko on the grass below the window. It’s mate was nearby chirping frantically. I picked the bird up in my hands but it looked like his neck was broken. Tending him gently, it became apparent that he had died. All I could do was leave him in a position where cats couldn’t get him so his mate could see for sure he had died. Then I left him to be taken by the night animals. Life and death. It’s all part of the cycle, but we often do not have any idea when our cycle is going to come to an end. A fluke accident can end it all.

It got me thinking about Kate’s question again, and after some more pondering I wrote the following:

“I guess, god to me, is the creative and destructive energies or spirits of the universe so to look at god is to see everything around me in all its dynamic glory. To truly appreciate the beauty of the Fibonacci series, numbers hidden in the patterns of life. DNA. To see a greenfinch dying in my hands today and looking at its mate grieving as I was powerless to change its fate. God looks like the man who stopped the tank in Tianamen Square. Or the look in the eyes of another being, human or non-human, who truly loves me unconditionally. I see god in the Eagle Nebula where stars are born or in the form of the event horizon of a Black Hole. I see god on the blade of the knife that respects the boundary of skin on another. I see god as a instantaneous flash of white light in my brain when the car in front of me stops dead on an A road without indicating and I have to do an emergency stop at 60 mph without killing me or my lover or the jerk who caused it. I see god as a stag, as a wolf, a red kite, a badger, a trillion beings and none.”

Kate had more than 50 contributions to her sermon today and a fantastic response. I imagine the diversity of thoughts and images was tremendous. And to me, that’s just what it shows…. how wonderfully diverse human beings are in their search for meaning in their lives.

As a counsellor I am feeling an existential drawing in to this search for meaning in our lives. I found a rare clip from 1972, on Ted.com of the legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl who delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning — and the most important gift we can give others. It feels right to end what is now this morning’s post with a link to Viktor Frankl’s own words about Why To Believe In Others. No matter how hard life is, we can find meaning inside ourselves to keep us going, to help us survive, and to help us find meaning in our own lives no matter what our ‘bosses’, our oppressors, our abusers chuck at us to break us. http://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning.htmlNeurologist

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl pioneered an approach to psychotherapy that focuses on the human search for meaning.

International Congress on Gender Identity and Human Rights – June 4-6, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain

For more information visit http://www.congenid.org/index.php

On behalf of the International Executive Committee (IEC) and Local Organizing committee (LOC), we are pleased to announce the International Congress on Gender Identity and Human Rights, June 4-6, 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

Never before has a government organized an international conference with a specific focus on transgender rights. Transgender human rights defenders are relatively new to the arena of human rights defenders. Usually their issues are discussed at conferences on the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, but their problems are distinct and need a specific focus and approach.

The idea of performing for the first time, a global conference with transgender people, by transgender people and for transgender people, aims as final target to gather and give voice to a group sparsely represented in society, to hear for the first time, with the participation of members around the world and from all cultures, an overall consideration of their problems, demands and proposed solutions.

The Congress has two main objectives:

- The adoption of a basic document addressed to the States, international organizations, associations and NGOs to serve as a working paper, line orientation and objectives document in the implementation of legislative policy and human rights protection to be applied to the group of transgender people. This document, probably called “The Declaration of Barcelone” will try to go further than a simple declaration of principles (first level) by becoming a proposal of concrete developments in the Laws of the countries (second level).

- The constitution of a global gender identity network for:

1.- The surveillance on the implementation of the declaration itself, and on the fulfilment of human rights conditions to the worldwide transgender community.

2.- The making of a global net of information exchange usefull for activists, governments and international organizations involved in an effective development of human rights.

3.- Being a tool for the exchange for a better practice and formation of worldwide activists.

To achieve these objectives, it has been established a format that includes not only the papers and round tables of the Conference itself, but the creation of 5 working groups to develop some very specific issues and to prepare 5 thematic documents which will form the basis of the “Declaration of Barcelona “.

Please go to www.congenid.org

 
If you want to attend the conference go to the register section. Also if you want to apply for scholarships or require help to obtain visa for the EU

http://www.congenid.org/en/home/participation.html

Easter musings from an ex-martyr transman

Three years ago at Easter I was still in shock after my partner left me. It was a beautiful sunny Easter and as I was slap bang in the middle of my counselling diploma course. I was writing, drawing, painting and sculpting my way around all the mixed up feelings that were flowing around my body and brain at the time. Loss. Grief. Unbearable sadness. Raw fury. Powerlessness.

I felt like I had been sacrificed as my now ex-partner took up with an old flame and best mate, someone I had known as a friend, indeed another counsellor.

Now I am not a Christian nor a believer in any religion. But I do have faith and I do value my spiritual self. I would say I am of a certain philosophical mindset that does not need religious dogma to explain the seemingly unexplainable in the this wonderful mysterious universe we occupy one tiny planet in. I am a dialectical materialist but I am happy to live with the uncertainty that comes with accepting the reality of what happens with matter on a quantum level where matter and energy don’t work in the same way as classic Newtonian mechanics predicts. I am happy to accept that things like ‘mind’, ‘self’, ‘consciousness’ are all emergent properties of our nature, as creatures with amazingly complex social brains and bodies.

But that Easter three years ago I found myself drawn to watch Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ and I was engulfed with the raw and wild grief that surrounds the brutal execution of not only Jesus, but all opponents of the Roman occupiers and their apologists. That weekend I drew a self-portrait of myself being crucified, myself as a woman. I was in bloody pain in the whole of my body and being and drawing myself as a crucified martyr deeply connected me to the pain I was experiencing in my own sense of self as I broke up with the woman I had loved for four and a half years. The picture I had created troubled me. Like I said, I am not a Christian and this experience did not in any way feel to me like a ‘religious moment’ but it troubled me nevertheless. I was worried that my Christian friends on my course would find it blasphemous, I was concerned that my therapist might think I had some sort of emerging ‘Christ’ fixation. What the hell would people think if they knew I was drawing pictures like THAT!! I wish I could find it as I would post it here but it is in a box somewhere right now… maybe I might find it by next Easter at this rate.

Now I look back on that time, in the place where I am now, on the cusp of becoming the man I feel inside, and I see that picture and all the raw pain of that time with different eyes. I realise now how my masculinity was experienced by my ex-partner and how vulnerable that made her feel. She had shared four and a half years of my life. We had gone through the joy of discovering she was pregnant after many months of trying, only to be devastated by the brutal cruel reality of nature when she miscarried some weeks later. In that short time, she was a mum and I was a dad. Even though I had not accepted my gender identity at that point, I KNEW I was a dad and not another mum. All that unresolved stuff underlay this feeling of fatherhood for me but I never got the chance at that point to explore it further and the grief of miscarriage and our inability to share this eventually became one of the reasons why my ex- felt I could not support her in the way that she needed.

We had another incident which chilled me to the bone and made me terrified of a part of my masculinity. Only a matter of days after she left me, my ex- slept with her ex- and best friend. When she came back and told me she was frightened. She told me something that made me feel she had been abused when she was vulnerable and I was raging about this. Not at her but the other woman became the focus of my rage. I wrote emails, luckily we didn’t live anywhere near each other, and we had a raging spat between us. My ex- became distraught at this and felt like we were ‘two stags fighting’ over her. When this culminated in a screaming row in the kitchen one day, my ex- saw the blood drain from my face as I rushed towards her. In her mind she saw me as another raging man who could harm her. She had been married for ten years to a bio man who was violent to her and in that moment with me she saw me in the same way as she saw him. In a flash she picked up a large chopping knife from the side and I stopped frozen in my tracks horrified at what was happening. She turned the knife towards herself and told me to back off. I can’t fully remember what happens next. Traumatic moments can be like that. But I do know I flipped into calm mode and no harm came of the incident.

I am very aware I have a shadow side and that there is a part of me that is capable of harmful violence. I no longer apologise for this as there have been times this part of me has saved me from a beating. There may be times in the future where in a moment my survival may be threatened that this part of me could quite literally save my life. But in my day to day life this part of me is kept safe and secure and under extremely disciplined self-control. I am fully aware, as I transition with testosterone that I have an absolute responsibility to keep this part of me in check. The energy and drive it will fuel me with will be aggressive at times and I will have to learn how to effectively and safely manage my anger and potential aggression in day to day life again. I have done much therapeutic work on my these feelings over the last four years and I enjoy working with clients who are also learning to take responsibility for these feelings, thoughts and actions. I guess I am looking forward to what this new experience of self-control is going to bring me.

For me Easter is all about the twin aspects of life – the wonderful beauty of new life in spring, with all its virility, fertility and bursting fullness of all the organismic selves on the Earth, coupled with the savage brutality of death, pain, grief and violence. They are all part of not only the human condition but also fundamentally rooted in the cycles of nature. It’s no surprise then that these themes pop up time and time again in the myths and stories and religious texts that human beings have created over the time we have been creating symbolic art.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever your beliefs, we are all united by our ability to create symbolic meaning to express our selves and our relationships with each other. Brutal occupations, executions, murders, rapes, exploitation, and abuses of all kinds need to be challenged all the way by human beings everywhere. We have to teach our children to disobey at times of ethical principle as well as learn to follow instructions when necessary. It means everyone taking responsibility for their own ‘sins’ and offences against other people. In the words of the great Patti Smith “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”. I don’t mean that disrespectfully but the idea that people can absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions doesn’t sit well with me. Far better to have ways that encourage people who commit offences to be faced with the consequences of their actions on the victims and then work out ways justice can be restored. And if someone’s too much of a risk to others’ safety then they should be somewhere safe and secure until they are not a risk of serious harm.

But, please we don’t need any more martyrs or executioners in this world.

What Happens When You Find the One…And He’s Nothing—Nothing—Like You Expected?

Allison Cooper and home with her fiance

After years of relationships that never seemed to fit, Allison Cooper finally met her match. And he was nothing—nothing—like she’d imagined. The whole article was published in the Oprah Magazine, 18 March 2010. You can read it here:

 http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Falling-in-Love-with-a-Transgender-Man/1

This is a love story. Like every other. And like no other. This is a story about how one day I believed certain things about myself and the next day I realized, knew the way you know a good nectarine, that I had been wrong.

About all of it.

This is what real love does, of course. Transforms. Enlightens. Boils off the fat. Reveals the sinew underneath. I had read about such things in poems. Sung along with the heartbreak songs. But I had not felt that sort of love myself. The kind that shakes you up inside like a Boggle board, jangling all your letters into wholly new words, some you’ve never seen before but recognize instantly nonetheless.

It started with a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding that in the end wasn’t a misunderstanding at all.

I first saw my love online. He had written something about music in a column I often read. The column comes with a photo of the author. And it was the photo, more than the words, that captivated me. It was nothing extraordinary. Just a head shot. Him, looking sleepy-eyed and stoned (which, as it turns out, he was) in a brown shirt and narrow tie. He was sitting down, slumped and easy, and it was obvious even from the pixilated screen of my decade-old computer that this man was unlike any other I’d known. I found myself staring, leaning in like he was an insect on the sidewalk. There was something about him, intelligence, warmth, confidence, but also, something else. Something I had no name for.

The rest of the article can be found at: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Falling-in-Love-with-a-Transgender-Man/1

Sunny side up is how I want my stress please…

It’s hard to be cheerful all the time, with a genuine sunny smile. Some days I really don’t feel like that at all and I shrivel and curl up inside with my jaw grinding as methodically as I breathe. But at least you know that when I smile I mean it, and quite a few of my days come sunny side up now I am on the road to being me.

It’s just that my body is pissing me off big time right now. It’s like my physical boundary is disintegrating as my skin inflames, prickles, bleeds and scars. My left eye is infected, itchy and sore. My gut is feeling bad, I’m nauseous at times and I’m wondering if my ulcer is coming back. I probably didn’t do it any favours last Thursday when I drank the remainder of orange and mango juice from a carton that had been two weeks open in the fridge. Bad move when you’re already on the third stage of your employer’s sickness policy.

Stress comes out in me incredibly physically. My body mirrors the frantic pace of my survival thinking, but it struggles to keep up. All the cortisol and adrenaline that continues to pump around my blood is eating me up from the inside AND the outside it feels. It’s well documented that higher cortisol levels caused by chronic stress have particularly damaging effects on immune function and inflammatory response. Hence my difficulty in resisting infection and why my ezcema is so bad right now! Chronic stress is painful, a day in day out pain that flows like a river through you. Sometimes, often, it is a murmuring brook that trickles and meanders with you in daily life. Occasionally it deepens suddenly and you feel the dead cold of the bottom that you fear plunging into. Rarely, it blows your body into shutdown, causing you difficulty in breathing and momentary paralysis. My body’s responses to external stresses like threats are also on hyper-alert which is tiring and draining. My fight-flight-fright-freeze response has been fucked up over the years with various trauma and it takes a lot out of me when I feel under personal threat. I’ve felt more of that recently since I’ve been living as a guy and it’s a weird and scary thing being conscious of my vulnerability in a way I haven’t experienced before I did my counselling training and my own personal therapy.

I notice that in the come down from the adrenaline torrent I can get emotional. When I get emotional people around can’t help themselves but experience me as female again. The social pressure on guys not to cry is enormous and it profoundly changes the feeling of vulnerability I have when I get emotional now. Being a guy who cries carries more risks it feels than being a woman who is in tears.

Of course I mean MY body does this under chronic stress. Maybe your’s is different. But if you also have experienced chronic stress then you will connect with some part of what I feel. I am struggling right now with living with chronic stress as I try and recover from a serious depression and make the biggest single change of my life as I make my transition from female to male.

Like millions of other working people I am struggling to keep up with rising costs and debt repayments as wages freeze. My breakdown last year when my partner and I lost our home had many financial consequences and I am working with the National Debt Helpline to get a debt management plan together or face bankrupcy. These are shit hard times and I have a feeling it is going to get worse before it gets better. The stress of dealing with liability orders, baillifs, informing them all that I am no longer Ms or Miss, no I cannot make a payment right now, I live back with my parents and have no assets except my car and I need that for work etc etc. 

But, on the other hand, I am aggressively determined to find £350 between now and May so I can see a private gender consultant and get my testosterone therapy underway. It pisses me off massively that this amount of money is less than what I spend in a month to run the car I need for work. In fact the WHOLE of my debt is less than a quarter of my annual salary. But like loads of other people I just cannot get credit to make it an affordable monthly payment these days, so it can and has in my case, spiraled further and further out of control.

Can someone explain to me why exactly it was only the bankers that have been rescued by government bail-outs in this current recession? The ones who are responsible for this fucking mess! What I want in this coming general election is for someone to have the bollocks or sharp pointy heels to call for writing off a good chunk of personal debt for individuals (especially people made redundant), a freeze on all interest and charges, an end to criminally extortionate financial fees, interest and charges and to enable millions of customers to reclaim what they have been forced to pay these last years.

I am seething with Santander who have just taken four weeks to explain why the computer still says no to my reasonable request to have ‘Ms’ taken off my bank card. Their legal advisor has informed them that the bank is under no legal obligation to comply with my request until I have in my hand my Gender Recognition Certificate some year and a half down the line for me. What about their ethical or moral obligation to one of their customers? Do they think it is ok to put one of their customers in a position where they are embarassed or humiliated when they are challenged over possible fraud because the retailer sees a guy trying to use a woman’s card? Even worse I could be at risk of serious assault in that conflict situation. So I am off to the Co-Op who tell me they will have no such problem with my request! Plus I can now try and claim back all those bastard charges Santander and previously Abbey have extorted out of me these last four years.

But it’s stressful in the extreme when you’re fighting off the vultures who want to strip your bones when you’re weakened and down. I am also completely desperate to get out of this alien skin and create the physical form for my real core gender. When I say desperate I really mean it now. It feels like I cannot move any further forward without starting my testosterone and getting my breasts removed as soon as possible. I need my body to be healthy and resilient for the changes ahead and my stress is getting in the way of this. Not only that but the WAIT is doing my head in now. I have to pay for a private consulation because it could take me until the end of the year or beyond if I wait for the NHS to deliver. My now new GP has agreed to continue the prescription once I have seen a recognised gender specialist. This is now going to be happening at the beginning of May, indeed quite possibly the day after the next General Election. But at least it is NOW going to be happening and that brings me some tangible relief that I could be starting my testosterone soon. I can then turn and begin to truly face the world as myself.

I am stressed about being ill again when I am so trying to look after myself. I am tired of the insomnia I am wading through night after night after night. I need the turbocharge boost of testesterone surging through my body to see me through this profound transition. I mean business and I want to deliver. But my depression is tugging me back constantly, kept at bay with a high dose of citalopram and the knowledge that I am doing a good job at work, generally coping well and am now only a matter of a couple of weeks off finally qualifying as a therapeutic counsellor. But inevitable obstacles and some deeply intense moments of vulnerability have made me understand that I am still living with depression and in no way ‘cured’ when I have a string of good days one after the other. I have been referred to a doctor by my employer so my depression can be assessed to see if it falls under the Disability Discrimination Act. That would protect my employment rights as a worker with ongoing mental health issues because the last thing I need right now is to lose my job on top of everything else.

I will be following the General Election from the perspective of someone who wants to see social, economic, political, environmental and ethical justice in this ravaged world. I have my own agenda of course. I’m a 43 year old professional worker hit hard by the recession like many others. I value solidarity not selfishness. I celebrate the rich diversity of our communities in this country I don’t feel threatened by difference. I detest racism and other forms of prejudice. I work with young offenders and their families and I want to see the resources provided to keep children and young people safe while allowing them to be young, take risks, play, learn and not get criminalised for being young and making mistakes. I want to see investment in safe and secure temporary housing/short-term foster placements for young people in crisis, to see more resources provided for working therapeutically with children, young people and their families. I want to see a whole heap of creative and radical policies up there to choose from about how we can get from the pit of doom we’re tumbling into now to a future where it’s need not greed that dictates public spending and where we are respected as workers and human beings who should be valued and respected wherever we are born in the world.

Above all else I want life to be about good stress not bad. I get a buzz from the adrenaline of taking on challenges and working with different people that I can learn from. I love the buzz of being physical when you feel happy in your body … I felt that during my testeosterone spurt of middle-late childhood. I just cannot wait to feel that again but this time with an adult brain to assess risk and an emotional literacy I wasn’t at all capable of as a kid!!!

I can see myself scoring a goal in this game now!

 

Jermaine Defoe ~ genius Spurs striker

This has been yet another rollercoaster week for me and, indeed, for some of the people around me too! I have now found out quite how long I am going to have to wait now for my first appointment with the Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) in London. It’s a long time….

It was three weeks Thursday that I saw the psychiatrist who has agreed my referral and written a clinical assessment letter for me.

Unfortunately, secretarial staff shortages led to my letter taking nearly three weeks to be written and it’s now meandering through the local postal system to get to my GP. But at least I now know it’s been done and I can push it along at my surgery to get it sent to the GIC pretty pronto.

Knowing now that it’s a matter of days before they finally receive my referral, I rang the GIC yesterday to see if I could find out a rough idea of timescales and process. I spoke to J, who works with referrals and explained my current position being ‘in limbo’ while I am already socially and psychologically transitioning. She was absolutely honest with me about the current backlog of referrals they have and the waiting I would have to do to begin my physical transitioning once my referral had been accepted. I was pleased she was so clear and direct with me, even though it was not the news I wanted to hear to be honest. But she delivered the disappointing news in a kind and genuinely empathic way, showing that she understood I was eager to change physically as soon as I can now.

So, I now am aware that if my GP sends off my referral along with the completed psychiatric assessment in the next couple of days, it will arrive at the GIC and get logged. There is currently a backlog of around 2 months with referrals and so it’ll probably take until mid-April for my referral to be considered by a senior consultant. If it is approved then the funding has to be agreed. I have to research this bit some more but I understand that once funding is agreed I will be sent out an information pack with a form to sign and return. Only at that point will I be given my first appointment down in London. I think I am looking at possibly getting my first appointment around my birthday in November.

Of course the upside of this is that by then I will have been transitioning socially and psychologically as much as possible (for not being able to physically transition yet) for over a year. I feel that this will stand me in good stead for as speedy a treatment response as possible from then.

The downside is that I have at least one summer wearing a double binder and thick T-shirts so I am hoping summer 2010 is going to be somewhat of a cool one….sorry folks but I am going to melt and stew if we have another scorcher this year!!

At least I can now see the goalposts in this long, tiringly stubborn but beautiful game of life I’m playing in. I know I’ve got my team around me and I can rely on them to support me or tackle the opposition. Sooner or later I am going to score in this game. I’m looking forward to striking what will be the goal of my life. Rest assured when it finally comes it will be a real belter and I’ll have a very special on-pitch celebration just waiting for the occasion.

Climbing out of the Abyss – part 3b

Into the Abyss - Jeffrey S. Pearce

KAPOW!!! KAPOW!!! The next two cartoon sucker punches to my already reeling mind-body-spirit continuum came in quick succession in the middle of my first supervision session with my manager last week.

Regular readers will know that I am lucky to have a line-manager who has bent over backwards to make sure that I know I am supported. It was she who had coincidentally ‘been there’ in my moment of death-defying choice between self-anniliation or self-acceptance. Had she not been the wonderful, empathic and accepting human being she is, who knows where I would be right now?

Anyway, I’ve returned to work now – albeit I’ve finished my phased return and am using annual leave up to give me 3-day weeks up to the end of this month. I have reports allocated to me and young people and families to assess and prepare programmes of work for. I’m happy back at work, getting into the swing of things, doing what I enjoy which is working with children and young people who have been convicted of criminal offences.

The first KAPOW came when my boss told me I was the first transgendered person to come out in the city council I work for. People are scrabbling around updating policies and procedures and wanting to do the right thing by me – but I’m going to be the guinea pig it seems. I had no idea I would be the first. It took me back to my heady days after I had come out as a lesbian when I was 21 and at college. I had been elected Welfare Officer to our Student Union, and was the first out lesbian the SU had ever had as a Sabbatical Officer. And boy was I OUT!

There is a certain powerful rush of energy that comes with the liberatory feelings of self-acceptance and then coming out to others. It’s like a headrush of responsibility to know that you are blazing a trail for others along the way. I will not speak for other people unless I have been given permission or asked to advocate or elected to represent. I can only speak for myself. In the words of Che Guevara:

“I am not a liberator.

Liberators do not exist.

The people liberate themselves.”

Obviously I want to make sure that my experiencing transitioning is as positive as I can make it. I’m lucky that the council I work for is pro-active when they learn about a diversity issue that they have not had to deal with yet. I am also a Unison member and able to get support from the Unison LGBT Network and National Officer. I’m lucky that I am transitioning at a time when my trades union has already paved the way, learning from the experiences of others who have transitioned before me. Taken all together with the wonderful support I have had from my team-mates, my managers, my partner and family, and all the transgendered people I have been connecting with these last three months; I am one lucky guy!

The second KAPOW came straight after the first. Like I said before, I had been off work with a serious depression between August and December. I started back just before Christmas and have been on a roll ever since, getting into the swing of things. Then first week in January I get hit by the norovirus winter sickness virus that has spread through the residential care home where my Gran lives. She got this nasty bug on Christmas Day, bless her. Then in dashing to the loo with the bug I twisted and hurt my back, which all meant I was off bloody work again sick for a week. This has now triggered the Third Stage of the Sickness Policy at work so I will be having a meeting with my manager and someone from HR soon, actually the person who is whizzing around trying to get the transgender policies all up to speed!

In the course of the discussion I had about this with my manager, she mentioned that she had flagged up to HR that my depression might be considered under the Disability Discrimination Act….

KAPOW!!! I had never even considered that my lifelong struggle with depression would be counted as a disability. I have long been an active supporter of the disability rights movement and I understood very well how people with mental health problems face prejudice and discrimination as much as people with physical disabilities. But I had never considered this in relation to myself before. Ever.

It suddenly overwhelmed me quite how deep and pervasive my depression has been in my life, and how it is so closely intertwined with my gender identity issues that have been there for me in all likelihood since I was just a few cells attached to my mother’s womb. When it hits me like that I do one thing only and that is cry. So I had tears streaming down my face and my boss asking me if I wanted tissues – but if she went out she’d probably draw attention to me. I had to laugh – I’m such a blub sometimes when I get emotional. But it’s true it’s a big big thing to consider oneself disabled.

When I got home later I looked up the Disability Discrimination Act and how it relates to mental health problems. It’s true… my long-term problems with depression have been a disability for me, under the terms it is defined in the guidance I have seen on the MIND website http://www.mind.org.uk/help/rights_and_legislation/disability_discrimination

So I guess this will mean ANOTHER meeting soon!