For a school assignment, Coyote Marie had to write up an interview of someone culturally different from her, and she chose me:
Amy is a forty-two year old trans-woman, formerly George. She has been transitioning to womanhood for ten years. While this is an ongoing process, she has for several years been living publically and privately as a woman. She speaks eloquently about gender, culture, power, identity, and her experience of these dynamics as they uprooted her entire being, and as her being re-formed itself anew amidst these old dynamics. For our purposes here, the focus is on how her experience has changed her position in the webs of culture – from overculture, to chosen culture, to family culture.
Amy locates herself delicately within all these webs. We spoke first about her location with trans culture, or its larger LGBT culture. On one end, there is queer culture’s sense of being proudly alternative, its emphasis on visible difference. Yet trans culture, Amy says, tends to emphasize “re-entering the overculture as seamlessly as possible.” For instance, she explains, often facial-feminization surgery is more important for a trans-woman to attain than sexual reassignment surgery – as was the case for her. (I expect this is true for many reasons – an intersectionality of issues concerning the coherence of identity and persona, the safe expression of these within one’s cultures, and availability of resources). And while Amy wants to be seen as entirely woman, she does not mind being “known” as trans. Indeed, publically telling her story has been crucial to her emergence and solidity in the world, even as “weird” as the experience is of “knowing you’re being known.” She smiles at it as a place that dramatizes her act of passing between cultures, and as I watch her publically speak her truth, I wonder at how her invitation to “knowing being known” somehow gives permission for the listener to open as well. Sometimes her listeners approach her individually afterwards aglow with their own sensation of “knowing being known.”
An effect of all this for Amy is that she feels disinterested in queer and trans cultures, although she appreciates the social benefits of living in a city with a large and in-charge queer population, and greatly enjoys certain events – the trans beauty pageant she entered last year served as an important “coming out” that left her feeling “initiated into public rather than trans culture specifically.” She says, “I feel kinship with trans people more than trans culture.” When asked, then, what culture she chooses to participate in, she knows instantly: “a non-gender or non-sexually-identified culture.” She explains haltingly how even in an “accepting culture” she’s left “not knowing where I stand.” To be seen sexually secondarily to being felt as a unique human soul is eminently preferable.
No surprise, then, that when asked how she feels about her culture of origin she answers, “Oh, totally alienated.” Her experience “turned male gender culture totally on its head,” and Amy feels this change most in her relationships with men. She says, “gender identity as a man was most conditioned in terms of other men. ‘Men do this!’” She names “this” as competition and animosity, and says they were “erased” in her. There was an omnipotent sexualization – “men like to [expletive]” – that is also “gone.” Manhood, too, entailed “brotherhood and common purpose;” asked where these qualities are now in her life, she pauses: a big question mark. She wonders how her relationship with her three brothers will evolve as they find the time and energy to reconnect. She also remarks that sexual tension changes, that as a male she was “incapable of a platonic place with women.” Sometimes, she says, her experience now with men is of “knowing I have something so many of them need” – a sense of their own femininity, of their own deep identity regardless of gender? – “I feel strongly differentiated. It’s not feeling like a trans person but like a woman, just myself.”
What is it like to go from being at the overculture’s top – a white upperclass male – to being significantly down the ladder? Insofar as Amy interacts with the overculture, this is an appropriate question. “There is a new creepiness going home alone at night.” However, in terms of Amy’s internal identity, she laughed good-naturedly at the question. “As a white woman I feel much less vulnerable and more privileged. I felt very vulnerable, not privileged, as a white man.” Her male self’s experience was of constant vulnerability and failure to achieve an endless barrage of “expectations” – to be tough, hard, strong, a sex-machine/guardian of women. She follows this with an extraordinary perspective on power that I had never considered before. As a male, feeling so vulnerable and powerless, power was found in an identity with the “freak.” Her male self’s masculinity was by virtue of the independence of the outsider. Now, she says, “I am still an outsider, but my power is in relatedness” – a power of interdependence.
I ask Amy about the myth of her family, and she replies, “It towered over everything.” She doesn’t enumerate the myth, but says instead, “My life is another episode of the destruction of that tower. My parents are left to say, ‘We did everything we could.’ The power of individuality is stronger than family myth.” I ask, “is that the new family myth?” She smiles at the possibility, and the possibility it offers for collective transformation as well as her own.
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