CHAPTER 2
Why is it impossible to talk to my mother? I have read all of the literature, all of the academic papers I can find on ideational and interpersonal function, and how to use it. I have looked up the non-verbal aspects, I have even practised them, but it makes no difference. She talks, I sit quietly.

She uses the same patterns, endlessly reinforced. The wise elder, the reluctant critic, “I hate to have to say this but…”.I fall into my own little reverie, counting the words she uses most, sometimes writing transcripts at home so I can see the patterns emerge. Jane always hated that, my sitting in bed with a pad and pencil, so I started doing it in the toilet. I’d pretend I needed a dump, and work out the structure while sat there, sometimes so long my thighs would fall asleep and it was only my pyjama bottoms that hid the red mark on my rear. She would be asleep when I got back, snoring away with the light on. I kept a packet of foam ear plugs by the bed for those nights.

Often, she would sleep with earphones in, listening to some odd story or other to “help her sleep”. I could never understand that. Stories are structures, they are open to analysis to find the engineering that makes them work. That is their attraction, for me anyway. It is like music; J.S. Bach is the best example I can think of. I really cannot understand the later stuff, later than Beethoven. All that syrup and lack of structure; compare it with “The Art of Fugue” and you will surely be able to see what I mean.

I won’t even mention pop. Or folk. The word that always comes to mind is “why?”

There are shapes to things, patterns in the world, and I love finding them. I cannot abide a lack of structure, and that was what confused me about my surreptitious pastime. I had, of course, read everything I could about it, and it frustrated me. Everything was fluid, there were no boundaries, there was no structure, nothing I could put into order. Everything seemed to be based around sex in some sides, and body image in others. I struggled to find anything that fitted me.

All I knew was that I felt at peace when wearing a dress or skirt. There was no arousal, and when I looked up the various internet sites my choice of clothing certainly did not fit any of their patterns. No odd lingerie, no silly shoes; I liked comfort, pleasant textures for my skin, not constriction and definitely not exposure. I suppose an outsider might use the word “frump”

An apt word. Outsider, that was my viewpoint. I stood outside, and watched, and tried to make sense of the patterns that people wove among and between themselves. I had met Jane through a newspaper personal ads section, “kindred souls” or some such. We had written for a while, met for some meals, and she had sort of moved in with me in a very short time. My mother said I was being railroaded, but then she had always wanted me to wed, and what with the lower tax loads for married couples, it made sense, and so we had made the necessary arrangements at the registry office, and I was officially normal.

I must allow myself a wry smile at that one. I have never been normal. Ignoring the clothing issue, I have never fitted easily into this world. I was beaten up regularly ay school for the crime of not liking those enthralments that other boys found so important. We lived in Gosport, and the local football team was Portsmouth, play up Pompey, and so on. Unless you were a Scummer, and supported Southampton, of course. I had no interest at all in 22 alleged adults chasing a bag of pigfart around a square (well, rectangle) of grass, which made me a Scummer to the boys at school, and a Pompey fan to the Scummers, and so on. I happen to like both red and blue as colours, and either could be the ticket to a beating, depending. At least there was structure to that one; I could minimise the risk by checking who was playing at home, and dressing accordingly. Of course, as I worked out later, my suggestions that one should support the team that had the best chance of winning, such as Manchester United, were actually not that well thought out. For some reason, the boys seemed to think that was being a little disrespectful, and that usually ended up in another beating.

University was different. One was expected to be different, it was almost de rigueur, but it did deprive me of access to my mother’s wardrobe. You have to understand that the internet was not a big thing in the UK in the nineties, and so my access to suitable clothing was not great. I had a couple of items, bought in charity shops and so forth, with the usual stories of costume parties and rag week events, but it wasn’t much. When there was an actual “drag ball”, I borrowed some bits off a girl in my hall of residence, and I remember my sheer joy afterwards when I didn’t have to get changed, nor hide in my room. I wore a nice frock with very modest neck and hem lines, some long boots with a three inch heel, and make up applied by the other girls.

It was the walk back to my room that was the best part. I was definitely ogled by some of the boys in the dim lighting, and while the normal pattern here would be to rhapsodise about the feel of the breeze and the swish of nyloned thighs against each other, it simply was not so. I just felt more real, more natural, more myself.

I was very loth to give the clothes back, so I made up a story about dry cleaners and kept them for a few days before I took them there. I hadn’t exactly lied, more sort of adjusted the time scale. I did get an odd look from the cleaner, though.

The trick of a good piece of fiction is often schema breaking, where a familiar route is signposted and foregrounded only to take an unexpected turn somewhere. The classic “shortest horror story”, for example, goes “The last man on Earth sat in his room. There was a knock at the door”. I am assured that schema theory explains a lot of jokes, those which do not rely on cruelty. The latter are the jokes I am more familiar with, of course.

I break so many of the things myself. This is the problem I have with my psychiatrist, as I have already intimated. She has attempted to fit me into one of a very precise set of patterns, and yes, she does know about my clothing choices, it is after all the reason I went to her in the first place.

I read, I read voraciously, I read for work, I even read what my students hand in, and I even do that with late submissions. The world is made of words, John’s gospel even starts with that assertion, and I find it impossible to follow things through unless they are verbalised. I spent the first part of my life trying to find the right label, because if something has no name can it really exist?

I told you, I witter. But my analyst gave me a number of labels and invited me to choose. Ask you, how can a thing classify itself? I tried…and she tried, and all she could say was that I had an illness. So let me put some of the “nots” into play.

I am apparently not a fetishist. I do not objectify particular items.

It is not a sexual thing, but then I am not really sexual, which was one of the problems with Jane. I mean, I performed on occasions as necessary, but she knew them for what they were: performances. I don’t think she appreciated the washing I would do immediately on finishing.

I do not hate my body, it’s where I live and I suppose it isn’t too bad for that purpose. I am small, slim and fair-haired and well within statistical norms.

As far as I know, I am not homosexual.

I do not see myself as a woman trapped etc in a man’s body, and that is where I believe I confused the doctor. I read a number of articles on the subject, and a commonly used phrase for that sort of individual was “When did I realise I am a girl? When did you realise you are right-handed?”

That is, in truth, very apt for me. I am a bastard type of ambidextrous, and am not “handed” at all. It is not that I do things equally with either hand, but that I change hands depending on what I am doing. I write with both at once when marking, for example, I deal cards left-handed and at school I played badminton and batted with whichever hand was convenient, and boxed with both stances.. In the cadet force, however, I fired rifles right-handed and pistols as a lefty. But I wipe my bottom with my right.

Wittering again. I did that with the lady, and then tried to use that pattern to bring out how I feel. I am a human being, as far as I can see, and that is as far as I can work it out. Viewpoint, again. I cannot empathise with handedness in people because I am not handed. I cannot empathise with the idea of gender dysphoria because as far as I can gather I have no absolute gender.

That is what sent my good lady doctor into a state of confusion. It is also, now, what I am trying to resolve. Do I need gender? What can it do for me that I really need? And if it turned out to be hiding deep within me, like a viral spore awaiting some signal, what would do if it were the wrong one?

My sessions in the surgery were leaving me more stressed than ever. I hate, hate, hate it when a routine cannot continue, and my other clothing was my comfort blanket, rather like the smells in my Mother’s house.. The more I struggled to find any evidence of my handedness beyond the physical, the more I had to unwind the spring of my life. Hence my carelessness at home and Jane’s wrong deduction.

She had asked if I felt like a woman, and I had replied that I couldn’t answer as I didn’t know what being a man felt like.

She said something about needing alcohol as I was leaving that day.