Being Normal?

An Essay by Angharad.

I’m sitting here in my dining room, which serves as a study cum computer room and library–I use the latter term loosely, I have books all over my house, but the dining room has a few more than the others, about a thousand more but that’s not the subject of this piece.

The idea for this arose as I was dressing this morning and is one that has occurred to me many times. It’s simply this, that much of the time the sort of things I wear are not that dissimilar to the things I wore many years ago, ie before transitioning.

I’m wearing a pair of jeans, a polo shirt and slip on shoes–okay they’re all designed for women, but a man could wear exactly the same things and not look out of place. Even when I wear skirts, occasionally to work, I often wear a jacket and the outfit becomes a casual suit–I used to wear suits and jackets in a previous life.

Some of my cycling gear is women’s some of it is men’s–the HTC shirt I bought recently, is definitely a men’s one–so what, it fits well enough and if it transfers one microgram of Cavendish magic–it was worth the price.

So, I didn’t transition to wear girly clothes, well not all the time, but I do have my moments. I’m a woman, I’m allowed to.

I recently watched My Transsexual Summer and it took me back many years. Thankfully, I got most of the excesses of makeup and clothing out of my system when I was in my teens and twenties, so it’s a little embarrassing to see newbies still dealing with them–overcompensating for lack of adolescent practice, and sometimes lack of natural women to advise them.

I also read a blog on today’s Guardian about bullying of gay pupils in British schools which mentioned transsexuals twice, once as the T in LGBT and once in the person of Nardia Almada, who won Big Brother in 2004. I agree that bullying in schools is a problem but for loads of children, not just gays or coloureds or any other minority group, and we need to do something about it, though quite what I’m not sure. In fact bullying is something we shouldn’t tolerate anywhere–schools, work, armed services, police or anywhere else it happens. Had it been known when I was in school, that I was transsexual, my life would have been very much more unpleasant. I disguised it reasonably well, probably because I wasn’t sure what I was myself but I wanted to be in the girl’s school across the way, so the clues were there.

When I look at my life, much of it is neutral, that is, it could be done by either gender. The job I do as a health professional tends to have more women than men in it, but there are men who practice it too. Housework is hardly the exclusive activity of women because it needs to be done by whoever lives in the house. I haven’t made it a career, as anyone who visits my humble hovel will attest.

My hobbies of cycling, natural history and ancient history aren’t gender specific–though if I were to race bikes, it would have to be as female–I wouldn’t stand a chance against men, even old ones–too many oestrogen ravaged muscles. Most of my bikes are women’s not because they’re girly, because they aren’t, but because I have a back problem and the shorter cross bar makes reaching the handlebars easier. I also have small hands, so pulling the brakes on women’s bikes is usually easier–thank goodness.

Transgender/transsexuals are reputed to be the group who sees gender/sex as being binary, male or female. Knowing what you want or don’t want, once you decide where you stand on the spectrum, allegedly. A view held by many mental health experts who are gatekeepers to our achieving the complete transition. But it’s wrong.

I played the game, always wore a skirt to the clinic and took my knitting or sewing to do in the waiting room, which I don’t know if it impressed the shrinks, but it used to get some weird looks from fellow patients. “You can knit?”

“Yeah, my mother taught me, didn’t yours?” Obviously not, and yes, I took a fair bit of stick from my dad, bless him, he didn’t know any better and I wasn’t able to re-educate him as he departed this life when I was thirteen.

I mentioned learning about what suited me in my teens and early twenties, which was helped by being married and having an in-house adviser/tutor, in turn I taught her to cook, something she still doesn’t enjoy doing, and she taught me the basics of sewing. We still see each other occasionally and are good friends, I see her as a sister and she sees me as a girlfriend.

I mentioned my father dying when I was in my early teens, it meant my mum had to go out to work full time to keep us together. I had to help in the house as did my elder brother, who is a very good cook, so I learned basic housekeeping skills as a matter of necessity. At that age, I knew I wanted to be a girl, but it wasn’t the done thing, so one tended to keep it suppressed. Had I been able to do the chores in a skirt, I’d have been far more enthusiastic but enough of the stereotyping.

Interestingly, my younger brother did nothing he could get out of, although he was the only one who then knew of my cross-dressing–from about the age of nine or ten–when it became obvious I was more than a cross-dresser, he didn’t cope too well and I haven’t seen him for several years.

Back to my main theme–we are often persecuted for being different. We often see ourselves as being different, but different to whom? I accept I’m not a girly girl–I’m a middle aged woman, who enjoys some things which aren’t always seen as the usual domain of women–natural history–funny, isn’t it that when we go dormousing, we usually have twice as many women as men turn up. Okay, bird watching, is usually dominated by know-all Bill Oddie types, but our cycling club has as many women as men in it and yes, the chair is a man, but I’m the secretary and hold the real power.

What I’m trying to say in a rambling sort of way, is that we’re all individuals and therefore by definition are different to each other, which is good, diversity is something natural systems need to survive and despite all sorts of arguments against us as unnatural, abhorrent in the eyes of God, nonsense, we are natural.

Apparently 40% of male marsh harriers adopt female plumage so as not to be attacked by dominant males. (Do they actually adopt it by conscious decision? I doubt it, but that’s what the experts say–I wonder how many tranny marsh harriers I’ve seen?) So life is much more varied and diverse than fundamentalists could ever imagine and the reality would probably blow their minds more than a pocketful of semtex.

I claim to be normal although ordinary might be a better word. An ordinary woman leading a mundane life with occasional excitement caused by flying down hill on a bicycle or holding a dormouse, a truly wild creature who is so cute it makes one’s heart melt. I work and pay taxes, I do my house and garden chores and clean out the cat’s litter tray. I write a bit, as one or two might have noticed, but it’s a good way of being too busy to do housework and less brain numbing.

I don’t claim to be exceptional at anything, in fact at most I am average at best, except possibly falling off bicycles, which I’ve been perfecting since childhood and have scars to prove it. I keep telling myself that I’m the best me there is, usually just after I’ve told myself I need to lose some weight–like most middle aged women.

So in conclusion, if I’m average at most things, doesn’t that put me within the norms of any system, and by definition, normal? Wonderful thing logic, must learn how to use it one day.