Trans People in Love

Tracie O'Keefe, Katrina Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780789035714
• eBook ISBN: 9781135695675
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Trans People in Love is a illuminating resource for members of the trans community and their partners and families; gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and intersex people; sexologists; sex therapists; counselors; psychologists; psychotherapists; social workers; psychiatrists; medical doctors; educators; students; and couples and family therapists.

Trans People in Love provides a forum for the experience of being in love and in relationships with significant others for members of the trans community. This honest and respectful volume tells clinicians, scholars, and trans people themselves of the beauty and complexity that trans identity brings to a romantic relationship, what skills and mindsets are needed to forge positive relationships, and demonstrates the reality that trans people in all stages of transition can create stable and loving relationships that are both physically and emotionally fulfilling.

1
Switcheroo

Stenton Mackenzie

I married her twice. She divorced me twice. The first time brutally, the second time, very coldly. The love we shared was anything but cold. I was pinned quite forcefully by it into a union, that became for me, the very fabric of my life. I learned more than I ever thought it might be possible to learn from another; I still mourn her absence, I still dream of her, vividly, strangely, hauntingly. I sometimes wish that she had died, imagining this would change the nature of my memory, and my gaping sense of loss. Perhaps her death would render romantic what really had not been a romantic affair—intense, transforming, dissembling, chaotic, exciting, dangerous, all of these—but not romantic.

My existence consisted of my life before her, my life with her, and now this. I am still “recovering” as the white coats put it, doing remarkably well they say, but who are they to comment on my progress out of the abyss? Paid to be impartial, trained to measure and weigh, sift, and objectify. This of course is why we go to them, for their “impartiality,” that exact quality lacking in the emergent, raw, writhing pain of separation.

We knew each other so well it often astonished us. The intimacy was like a drug and it makes her absence so painful still. It is as if a piece of me is missing. She and I had a symbiosis, an ability to understand what the other was thinking and feeling. We could finish each other’s sentences; we were barometers of each other’s fears and desires. We had chemistry; moments of brilliant repartee, people would sip—no, guzzle—off our interaction, attracted by the doubling of charisma and the giddy, infectious intoxication of being utterly in love. We flaunted our spark, daring others to harness their own electricity. Our love was larger, grander, more enthralling than either of us had experienced with another. Our intensity fed upon itself, fueling a higher and higher sensitivity to each other, which was irresistible, like a narcosis, which upon removal felt like a little death.

We came close to dying together in the early days: an Alpha Romeo convertible she had taken great delight in my encouraging her to buy slipped away from the black ice on the tarmac of a railway over-pass on an early December day not long after we were first married. It catapulted down a sixty-foot embankment, twisting and pivoting diagonally, and landed upside down, rocking on a roll bar I had insisted on having installed only weeks before. The convertible rested on an enormous tree stump measuring some six to eight feet across, and we swung suspended in seat belts beneath the roll bar, which prevented us from being flattened like bugs. As the car left the bridge and took flight, she reached over, took my hand, and said very simply, “I love you.” The memory is crystal clear. In those molasses-like moments before the car finally struck the earth at the bottom, with a sound like an-end-of-the-world-explosion, we thought we were going to die.

Oddly enough, the edgy drama of those moments did not bond us together; our individual recovery differed—I adjusted more poorly to the confusion and fear, which is part and parcel of healing after head injuries, while she was impatient to get back to work and put it behind her. I wallowed. She was cross and tired.

The ambulance attendants, admissions staff, and nurses who subjected us to untender mercies for the three days we spent in the hospital were disenchanted by our attempts to remain together in the emergency ward. They wanted to separate us onto different floors; mostly I think to avoid the discomfort of nursing two lesbians who were obvious in their love for each other. Homophobic nurses armed with large needles were cruel in their dispensing of power. My wife rose from her bed, staggering drunkenly from head trauma, dragging a saline drip and pole in her wake, and in loud, uncompromising tones declared we would only be separated over some nurse’s dead body—“Whose was is going to be?” I lost consciousness again somewhere in the negotiation between a small squadron of grim-faced emergency staff and my protector. Ultimately, we were rescued by the impressive domination of my mother’s latest husband, an ex-Major General who was not going to be disobeyed by a few insubordinate nurses. The General had the final say, returning subsequently to transport us from the inhospitable malignancy of the emergency ward.

* * *

The Freudian and post-Freudian position that all our experiences of love relations are ultimately and finally a result of the initial bond with our mothers is not far off the mark. My mother was a romantic—in all relationships, not just with men—and it was her downfall. The word “downfall” is now oddly antiquarian, invoking a Western idea of courtly love born out of the dark ages of Europe and ending in a fizzle sometime before the first World War. It resonates strongly with the mysteries of fate, a beguiling concept in itself, particularly for romantics, who rely heavily on its intricacies in deciphering the whys and wherefores of their loves, losses, and near misses.

I felt romanced in the beginning. She pursued me with a certainty that was a bit shocking. I was young—only twenty-two to her thirty-three. She seemed altogether sure of herself, perhaps a bit bossy. I did not mind that. It was reassuring. Her certainty swept all those before it. She charmed my mother, to whose home I had recently returned in a hasty and undignified retreat from my first marriage, which had ended in a graceless and unchivalrous infidelity on my part. I had schlepped home with a lover, possessing in her youth equally grace-less tendencies and a leaning toward the bottle and bitterness. I left this uncouth companion to her own devices one night and went to a lezzie dance at a local hall. I was trying to pull up my socks, to pull myself out of an aimless lethargy that had overcome me. I went out to “put on the dog” I suppose. The unwarranted ungratefulness of the companion rescued from the dank and wasted fundamentalist population of a Canadian province that shall remain unnamed was taking a toll. She and I shared a room in a condemned Catholic Chapel as we huddled against the most savage winter experienced in that locale in one hundred and twenty-five years. Of course that would have been the year that my first wife and I chose to make our great escape from the incestuous lesbian community in which we had met. We drove many thousands of miles in an adventurous, but as it turned out, uninspired choice, to face a winter of catastrophic proportions.

Perversely, my return to the community I had suddenly and disastrously left, led me straight into the arms of my second wife, to whom my first wife had introduced me to three years earlier. No one except us seemed particularly happy with this new turn of events—not the rescued girlfriend, not my first wife, nor the current wife of my then to-be second wife. It was messy, but my new lover cared not a bit. She bedded me and promptly moved me into the “family” home which consisted, prior to my arrival, of herself, her wife, her son, two large dogs, and a couple of cats. Everyone disapproved. I was witless, carried along on a tide of lust and the vague sense of having escaped, yet again, an unfortunate assemblage of boring, unattractive, and seemingly futureless details of my life.

I have always claimed I fell in love with her the afternoon of our first introduction, myself a tender nineteen years of age. She half-heartedly scoffed at this assertion in the way women do when they are secretly pleased that you could have, or might have, felt such a powerful and instant attraction, even if they suspect you are wishfully and retroactively doctoring the story. I do know I felt something I had never felt before that afternoon, as she poured tea from her big Brown Betty. It lingered. It drew me in. I was curious. And I was conscious of her curiosity. I often return in my mind to our first meeting, rooting and digging for the edges of that feeling, and finding, in spite of it having no clear borders or no distinct definition, that it remained compelling.

As the trans man I am now, I look back, trying to identify moments which possess a significance that only exist in the retrospect of a special and unique vantage point. She always liked my maleness. She had no hesitation in saying that. She was almost proud of my maleness, adamant in stating that it was a strong element in the sex between us. I was androgynous. Half of the time, unless I opened my mouth, people mistook me for a male. My hips are small, my shoulders wide. My face was angular, and big-nosed, my expressions and gestures masculine. My hair was dead straight and often cut very short. I walked with a swagger, spoke in direct phrases, and had a direct gaze. I never said much.

She said the reason I so often won the disapproval of lesbians was because I was so male. I had emerged in the 1970s andro-clone season when all lesbians wore plaid shirts, no one admitted to using dildos, let alone a strap-on, and the politics of sex equated penetration with rape and patriarchy. So we did not penetrate. Bollocks. We did, we just didn’t admit it. Those politics also said femmes did not exist. To be a butch was slightly more acceptable, but still begging for exclusion. I was excommunicated many times over.

She and I started to wear leather; we flirted with the style but not much of the content of the S/M world for which the likes of Pat(rick) Califia were (and still are) resoundingly condemned. We shared a mutual fascination with Carole Pope’s raw sexuality and uncontained identity; we spent money on drugs—cocaine, grass, hash—on good scotch, on nights in hotel rooms with room service and nice linen. We celebrated sex. We dug in and got our faces dirty. We rolled like unconstrained pigs in the turbulence of our fights, which were many and damaging, and in the aftermath of those emotional holocausts we slathered on the salve of combustible sexual diversions. It was heady stuff. I still have the scar on my shoulder where she bit clean through the epidermis into my deltoid muscle during the throes of an orgasm. I know she will not forget when I took her for the first time with my fist, quite spontaneously, up against the wall on the floor in the suite at Long Beach, and she sucked my fist in so deeply that I was lodged halfway to my elbow as she spasmed around my forearm, completely helpless in the necessity of surrender.

When my clit took off under the effects of the testosterone she was impressed and excited. She was horrified at the savagery of the bilateral mastectomy, which never looks terribly presentable in the early stages of recovery. She was there briefly after the first of my chest re-constructions—we had separated for the second time at that point—she said she mourned the loss of my breasts and declared the surgery a mutilation. She felt differently about my micro-phallus. In some of my darkest moments when I have longed for the intimacy and the intensity our sexual dialogue forged (ironically, most particularly during the last few disintegrating years of our marriage), I would torture myself with the memory of her, mouth full with my little phallus, slurping and groaning as she sucked me, saying in a breathless voice, “God, it’s so big.” I felt like a king, and she like my queen, and not just the king and queen of a porn movie, which in all fairness is laugh-ingly what that scene brings to mind. All I heard was the desire in her voice—desire for me, for what I had become, for what I was becoming. And I rejoiced. The biggest fear that transsexuals face is that no one will ever love them or desire them again as a result of the changes wrought by surgery and hormones. That afternoon I knew I had touched a deep level of want in her, and that want was for me, at that moment, in that form, in all my “hugeness.” And I was happy.

That, however, was not to last. It was a brief respite amidst the tail end of the second divorce, and is all the more poignant because of a juxtaposition with the agony of the second, final separation. I will now make the bold claim that it was not my transition that ended the marriage. It was, as that common catchphrase of straight divorce documents in years past went—irreconcilable differences. Differences potent enough to eventually destroy the fragile bond that initially drew us together. She may deny it, but I truly believe that my being a trannie was really just a blip in the chart relative to our other dilemmas. The problems and the errors of judgement we made along the way seem to have little to do with something, in my case, as explicable as gender displacement. I think in her heart of hearts, she actually had a great deal of sympathy and understanding of my predicament. But it was perhaps in some ways the perfect excuse for drawing an end to what had become a very painful and dangerous relationship. The difficulty for me has always been that there was so much that was joyful in our union. It was almost as if our love led another life, a separate existence entirely from the squalor and immaturity of our fights, the struggles for control, and the relentless acquisition of layers of damage of which we were intimately aware, but unable to prevent.

* * *

There were no ceremonies for our first or second union, unlike the present gay trend toward public and legal formalities. We celebrated in our own, private way, walking a favorite beautiful beach at night, wandering into the water’s edge, hand in hand, kissing, murmuring, promising. She paid for a honeymoon holiday in San Francisco, a hotel in the gay ghetto, dinners of sushi and champagne. I laid on the nude beach far too long one afternoon and roasted so excessively that I had to retreat to the double bed in the hotel with ice cubes and the blinds drawn for a couple of days, and she complained I wasn’t much fun in such a condition. Sex was out of the question. To make matters worse, my eyelids swelled shut, rendering me blind for a short time.

In those days I had a twenty-eight inch waist; she delighted in buying the tightest jeans I could squeeze into, and encouraged me into baths of hot water, insisting I wear the jeans on my body until they dried, thus ensuring the eventual fit would have the maximum amount of sex appeal. She loved being the older of our pairing. At this point she was thirty-four to my twenty-three, and this titillated her. She luxuriated in the mystique of the older woman seducing the younger. She played happily to my youth and naivety. And I was naive.

We explored San Francisco (SF) on our honeymoon, returning another time on two motorcycles with her eight-year-old son—my step-son—who rode mostly behind me since she judged me the better rider and therefore the safer bet for his survival. We relished SF even though it was long past its prime by then. By the late 1980s the Pride parade was a pathos-filled mix of the healthy, flamboyantly pinkest-of-the-pink, and gaunt faggots gamely lugging their oxygen tanks behind weakened, scarred bodies. In 1983 my lover and I revelled in the queer counter-culture of the city, exploring Castro and the Tenderloin at night with an equal share of touristic voyeurism and genuine feelings of belonging. We wore our black head-to-foot leather, jiving on the camaraderie of the other leather freaks on the pavement and in numerous holes-in-walls.

We found a bar that made such an impression on me, that sometimes the memory feels imagined rather than real. The Oasis was a large venue, inhabited by what, to my rural, small-town self, was surely the crème de la crème of the hip sexual and social outlaws of SF. It was sophisticated, utterly relaxing, and totally absorbing. The music was sublime, rooms segued one into another, people wandered, talked, danced, and slithered from group to group; we felt as though we had come home. I remember clutching one another in our excitement as if it had been created just for us. Years later we sought it out again, but it had, of course, changed radically and we were out of place and pointedly unwelcome.

But that night we were in heaven. Out back a swimming pool was surrounded by lights and people sauntering, vibing, and, to our intense delight, smoking marijuana. It was the first time we had tripped across a public bar or club in which this was permitted and indeed, seemed de rigueur. We lit up and roamed amongst the crowd, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune, mentally etching the mood and environment into our beings, knowing such an encounter would not soon come along again, if ever. The Oasis fed our sense of solidarity—as if all our wildest hopes of how people might socialize if only they had the necessary imagination. For my lover it was a whiff of her memories of the 1960s, for me it was what I had always been missing, but could never really envision.

In San Francisco we met our first flesh-and-blood trannie, a male to female (MTF) of extraordinary insight, intelligence, and gentle sensibility. She (DB) drank scotch with us in the hotel bar and shared tales of transitional adventure. She was fascinating. I was intrigued, and so was my lover. Why it did not occur to me then that such a thing, in reverse, was possible for me, I will never understand. It would take another ten years before it swam into my perception as an answer to my discomfort at my position in the world. I don’t say the answer, because nothing is ever that simple.

Our new friend was midway through surgical transition, fabulously dressed, and projecting an assured and dignified presence. She was sad about the losses in her life which gender reassi...

Table of contents

• Trans People in Love
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Switcheroo
• 2 My Desire to Be All Woman
• 3 Our Trip to Vancouver
• 4 To Fight, Live, and Love at the Gender Border
• 5 Perfect Day
• 6 A Transgressor’s Love
• 7 I’m Not a Lesbian, My Wife Is: Norms and Perceptions in a Trans Marriage
• 8 Nick and Mark
• 9 Beyond Gender and Sexuality
• 10 From Russia With Love
• 11 Queerly Beloved: How a Lesbian Love Survived Transition
• 12 Sex and the Single Trannie
• 13 Between Shows: A True Story
• 14 To the Three Women I Loved in My Transgender Life
• 15 Bodies May Lie but Hearts Never Do
• 16 Satan and Lady Babalon: Polyamory Again at 64
• 17 The Adventures of a Trans Man in Love, Sex, and Spirituality
• 18 Eternity Fields of Yokatatumba
• 19 My Husband Had a Sex Change—Shit Happens
• 20 Things of His
• 21 Love Lost and Found
• 22 From Queer to Eternity
• 23 Kayla and Laura
• 24 Madam Carmen
• 25 Still Queer After All These Years: Reflections on Being in a Trans Couple
• 26 Notes for Trans People
• 27 Notes for Therapists