Somewhere Over The Rainbow: Spontaneous Human Kindness
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Today, the 23rd of November, is the second anniversary of one of the most terrifying events i have ever experienced.
Last year, in the shock of lockdown, i cowered from the anniversary, trying to distract myself, alone, without the comfort of friends. Trying futilely to forget the horror of that day.
This year i’m going to take a different approach. For, even though i experienced sheer raw terror on that day, i also experienced some of the most wonderful spontaneous kindness i have ever known, freely, earnestly given by complete strangers simply because i was a fellow human being in danger and in pain. So i am going to put my experience, the events leading up to it, and the kindness into words to celebrate spontaneous human kindness today. As a trans woman with trans friends and with a growing interest in helping trans young adults and teenagers, i meet gender diverse people, particularly gender diverse young people who have experienced the most terrible unkindnesses. Unkindness so egregious, often perpetrated by those who gave them life and whose sacred duty is to support their child as they truly are, that i find myself needing breaks from my volunteer work and specialist counselling myself to shield myself from the trauma i tend to take on vicariously. So i am in no way minimizing the pain that is inflicted on gender diverse people and i emphasize that we as a society have a long way to go in treating gender diverse people with the simple dignity that is every human’s birthright.
But i let’s not lose sight of the kindness that we are capable of, and i have to say that the people of Berlin have been quite simply lovely to me as a trans woman.
Kindness is real, and, in the absence of trauma, i am convinced people are hardwired for kindness. Our survival as a social species depends on it.
Let me begin with a story of when i came back to Berlin, alone, when my family had stayed in Australia because my transition had exploded after i could not hang on in the wrong body any longer. I was finally honest enough to concede to myself that i was transfemale — which i never really doubted in the slightest, it’s just that it was kept in a locked room in my mind that i forbad myself ever to open, lest it should destroy me if i allowed myself thoughts in that direction. I admitted to myself that crossdressing would never cut it for me, and indeed it ALWAYS made me thoroughly, abjectly miserable as all it did was let me taste for a few hours a state where i knew i could not stay, often leaving me howling in a fits of grief on all fours at crossdressing events, grief that so wracked my body with paroxysmal sobs of anguish that i just wanted to dash my head against the nearest brick wall to smash myself out of consciousness and halt the unbearable pain that i had let slip, something i indeed did on one occasion towards the end of my experimentation with crossdressing. Sometimes i so wish certain families of gender diverse young people i meet could see me as i was then to know that this could be their child if they are denied support: lying on a stretcher, my cheeks smeared with blood, tears and snot, and the disrespect i was treated with as the paramedics cut my dress off sneering “ya got the wrong outfit, mate” under pretext of examining me for body wounds and hurled it into the medical waste bag. My sweet midnight blue dress, with a gorgeously generous calf length skirt that flared magnificently, giving me the appearance of a waist despite my scrawny, oversized-nine-year-old body, that I’d put so much love and expectation into choosing, with the magenta and cadmium yellow and orange roses print with the pretty boat neckline. My choice was filled with such desperate, forlorn hope that i could find respite in events like these and that the dress’s beauty would see me succeed even though i had always failed before. And now i couldn’t even gift it to a friend. I can still see those sublime colors and feel the throb in my chest that their mesmerizing beauty kindled; when i think of the sheer disrespect that tore my dress from me, the memory is almost as painful as that of the loss of my first cat when i was 12, Nicole, the Siamese who shared my cot in my earliest memories with the big voice and the big heart.
I found this dress two years ago, and it is very like one that was so cruelly torn from me twenty five years ago. To wear it helps heal the grief for the loss i experienced on that day. Unfortunately these photos don’t quite do it justice: the blue in particular is a deep midnight leaning towards ultramarine, rather than marine as it seems here. The dress has magenta, crimson and burnt cadmium yellow and orange roses and peonies. Right hand photo is by Elke Schöps. — Selena_Ballerina
My darling partner and i decided a temporary split to deal with our deep but very different griefs would be helpful. Those months were horrible for both of us, and for our darling son, because we couldn’t promise him at that stage whether we would stay together. For many months, life for me comprose merely putting one foot before the other and shuffling on. I had been the stay-at-home parent for many years and suddenly to have no children in my life felt like having half my soul torn out. To have people who should have known better ignorantly allege that i had simply “gone off and left the children” behind my back was hurtful beyond description as my whole being ached to hold my partner, whom i’d hurt, and my little ones. Those most judgmental of me it seems were those who’d lost very little through my transition whilst my partner, whose life i had tipped upside down, treated me in her grief with nothing but kindness, love and respect.
Even in the early days, it became clear to me that my pint sized, 160cm tall partner, through her sheer grace, was a giant who towered over others close to me, some who plighted in solemn Hollywood-phantasy troths that they would support me "whatever my decision", only to show that, when i wasn't bluffing and thus inflicted through my transition a perceived loss of reputation for them in their elite boardroom and golfclub circles, how their troths were mere words and how they were people of little honor, at least when it came to me and when it really mattered.
For every person who was willing to throw me under a bus the moment they perceived me as a liability, there was at least one other, and usually more than one, who was willing to stand by me, and this has been a consistent pattern throughout my transition. I have never failed to find someone willing to comfort and show understanding, no matter what hurt others threw at me.
I was not out at work and indeed the new fulltime academic job in Berlin was probably partly a catalyst for me. I had freelanced for six years as our children went back to school, and this job was the first “real” job i had had since being the fulltime stay at home parent in the foregoing ten years. As my children became more independent, i realized that i had never found anything like the meaning i had found in walking with them through their early childhoods as they came to connect with their world and feel Nature’s divine love. Raising our children was absolutely the job i was born to do, and i adored those wonderful days watching over our little ones. Moreover, although i wasn't consciously aware of it, i had always yearned for nonsexual female intimacy, and, in the almost all-female world that is Australian childcare, i found this healing intimacy. My first-time Mum friends didn't see my gender and accepted me as one of them — we simply shared the joys of our babies in the loveliest days of our lives. Indeed, my acceptance in this world soothed my need for transition considerably. When one is raising children, one is so busy and focussed on one's little ones that it renders one unaware of one's own needs, but, in my case, i was meeting my own needs at the same time as those of my children like i had never met them before, yet i never really noticed this state because the childcare world is such a whirlwind. So the thought of leaving my feminine, childcare world and becoming a male academic broadsided me — it frightened the bejesus out of me, even though i thought i had wanted it so much. What i actually wanted, if i'd taken the time for introspection and gained self awareness, was collaboration with my darling boss Ute, whom i had worked with for a number of years and repeatedly, unsuccessfully applied for funds from the German government for our scientific project. So when we were at last successful, and the funds would create a fulltime job for me, i will NEVER forget receiving that job offer letter addressed to Herrn Dr. <Deadname>, casting me again into a role that was not me, filling my head with visions of growing old as the wrong gender and instantly provoking a panic attack.
So i was back in Berlin, firmly on the road to transition but without my family, knowing i had done the right thing (i had nearly carried out a suicide attempt that would not have failed) but sure that the relationship with the love of my life would end. I am prone to vocal ticks, and, with visions of my family constantly in my mind and in my fragile emotional state, i would often blurt out their names involuntarily. These vocalizations accidentally outed me in the womens toilet at a Kneipe in Alexanderplatz about two weeks after i had arrived in Berlin. The lady at the washbasin next to me, even notwithstanding her initial obvious shock when we swapped glances and both clearly understood what was happenning and that we were both aware of it, touched me affectionately on my upper arm and said how lovely i looked. I burst into tears of relief and joy at a display of such genuine, spontaneous kindness. A moment before, she had taken a step towards me to touch me, and in that dreadful split second i thought that she would hit me. Was I so surprised at her ultimate reaction! I was already imagining my shattered emotional response to her blow.
That was a turning point for me. I realized that her attitude was not unusual, and i felt safe. I had the deepest conviction that what i had done was the right thing, and Berlin was safe, i was safer than i would be as a trans woman in my homeland: i was utterly sure of that now. The day afterwards, in Galeria Kaufhof, i heard the gorgeous words of Krezip (“Sweet Goodbyes”):
All the things we’ve lost will teach us,
see the pretty things in life
All the places that we’ve been to
The people we relate to
All the love that we give in to
Blow the tears from our eyes
It let slip floods of tears, but at last they were healing stars instead of the sweat of despair, and conversations with my family over zoom began to feel less sad and stressed and more normal. Grief had turned from numbness to tears and sadness — difficult — but definitely a step in the right direction. I knew i would survive.
TW: Description of my teenage sexual abuse trauma, thoughts around death and mortality — BUT THERE IS ALSO A DESCRIPTION OF KINDNESS OF OTHERS
Which brings me to my anniversary. Transition awakened memories i had not examined for decades in horrid vivid detail. It took me back to the years between when i was 11 and 18, as my face and voice changed and became alien to me in a way that i felt to be almost unbearably alien. I retreated into studies of fundamental science, for it showed me beautiful worlds beyond humans, beyond gender, and i found a comforting humility in its teachings of our insignificance and the hollowness of our attitude that we think we are the center of everything. It was the only reason i survived. Together with these agonizing memories, my hormone replacement therapy induced ferocious breast tenderness from when i began in July 2019, far more than is wonted for transfemale HRT, for i have had all my life since puberty natural breast tissue owing to my genetic state. And i found that the slightest bump, even the jets of water from my showerhead against my chest, begat involuntary titanic flashbacks to my repeated assaults of 1978 and 1979. At age 14, my nipples and areolae feminized — i never had much volume till my early 20s, but the look was still highly conspicuous to the overprivileged little grubs at the expensive all boys school i was sent to — i was constantly held down — sometimes with someone’s soiled socks or undies shoved into my mouth to hinder my crying out — or flattenned against a wall to be groped, wrenched, twisted and yanked by other students in attacks of ever increasing ferocity against my crime of having “Sissy Titties”. Sometimes my attackers thought it was oooh so hilarious to stick me in exquisitely sensitive breast tissue with a compass point, laughing, “You’ll go pop”. This went on with attacks every few weeks throughout 1978 and 1979. So ferocious were the attacks in the end that the tissue and muscle of my left breast gave way and tore away from my chest cavity. I still have referred pain down my left arm and the tissue to this day occasionally flares up in response to swimming and kayaking strain. As i try to make sense of what happenned to me, i find the writings of feminist theorist Judith Butler and her study of the concept of gender policing to resonate exactly with what happenned to me. ( This Book is also worth reading in connexion with these ideas.) This article here does not surprise me in the least, and shows that attitudes within elite schools in Australia have not gotten a whit better since such a school was inflicted on me.. In Australia it seems that every few months similar stories slip past the PR of one of these schools, public “apologies” are begrudgingly given when excruciating damage control PR at last fails, but not a whit changes. The rape culture crisis that permeates all power structures in my homeland, rotting to the very highest levels of state office and exemplified by the ordeal of Brittany Higgins, is merely a natural consequence of the environment i knew all too well at my school, which is the kind of place that grooms those in power and those who enter the political class in my homeland. The vibe i got from those boys was a sickening mixture of the gleeful anticipation of the bystanders waiting to dart in opportunistically for their first grope of a breast and the dominant vibe of the main perpetrators — a vicious, deadly earnest wish to exterminate. My mere existence itself told against those boys’ rigid concept of gender so offensively that they wanted simply to efface the aberration, to pretend it were never there, i felt their hatred and i felt that, would there have been no legal consequences, they would have been more than happy to snuff the life out of me. Owing to my genetic state, my musculature never masculinized, unlike that of the other boys, and their overwhelming physical strength compared with mine was breathtakingly horrifying. The force brought to bear against me, even from attackers significantly smaller than i, astounded me — i had never felt anything like that physical strength in another human being directly. It was terrifying, and i had no one to turn to to help. I simply could not risk my breast growth’s and body feminization’s being discovered by my family and the medical profession. I was a voracious reader at 14, and i used to abscond from compulsory after school sport, checking my name off the list at rowing training then escaping over the fence to go to the nearby University of Melbourne’s medical school library and make it back in time for rollcall at the end of training. At the library i would pore over psychiatry texts to research my “problem” and what mainstream medical “science” thought of me. I thus knew very well that the “cure” in 1979 would have been to strip me surgically of my breast tissue, administer high dose testosterone replacement — in all earnestness i would rather have taken 100mg intravenous tetrodotoxin than testosterone therapy — and to begin “counselling” to correct my “mental illness”. I might, through my disdain for authority, have survived counselling, but i know without the shadow of a doubt that either of the other two- enforced physical mutilation — would have seen me annihilate myself.
To be attacked in that way in that part of the body begets a highly, highly particular kind of pain — i doubtless do not need to tell many women that — that i had never before or since felt, and, although HRT was not excruciating, that weird, particular, long forgotten feeling of assault came back to me through the little twinges that arose from HRT. The feeling’s deep but long forgotten wontedness, like that of a long forgotten scent, had a powerful effect.
This all caught me by terrible surprise. I had no idea of the depth of latent trauma; i felt that i had decided long ago that these attacks were not going to define me and indeed the perpetrators seem now like pathetic, degraded, shadowy ghosts to me. I saw one of them 10 years later, keeping a safe distance so we didn’t actually meet, at a Dead Kennedys concert at Monash University and actually felt sorry for him that he had degraded himself so. I had put it all out of my mind for the best part of 40 years. The only important take home message seemed for me to be: no child of mine is ever going near that school and not the private system. That was all i needed to know and remember. But somehow my body remembered the trauma, and i was almost physiologically compelled to live it all again — over and over. The flashbacks swiftly kindled panic attacks, which my doctor hamfistedly tried to control with a hefty dose of Xanax, a highly potent and unbelievably swiftly acting benzodiazepine — it is so fast that you can easily consciously feel its overtaking your physiology. Hallucinations are a seldom, but definitely not unheard of side effect. My Berlin Endocrinologist, Australian GP and psychiatrist were all shocked that this drug had been chosen for me, and shocked at the dose prescribed for someone who had never needed any anxiolytic medication before. But it worked brilliantly well two times, stopping panic attacks dead in their tracks. For a couple of months all that i needed was to know it was in my handbag, and that awareness was enough to quell any rising attack. But one day at work i took the prescribed milligram as the anxiety waves seemed disturbingly choppy after i clumsily caught my chest on a doorframe walking through. I have always seemed to bump my body clumsily into my surroundings, my proprioception not quite as developed as most people’s. “Are you fighting with the furniture again? The furniture always wins, you know”, is a lighthearted response by my partner and daughter to my expletives at home when i do this. But on this occasion, i could tell in the hour afterwards that, this time, the effect of Xanax was going to be different, so i began to make my way home.
And so, exactly two years ago today, this all lead to my having a psychotic episode on the platform at Bahnhof Adlershof at peak hour. It was the most terrible motion hallucination. I hit the ground, screaming, straining frantically to dig my fingers into the ground to cling to the earth that i felt certain was going to open up and swallow me. Berlin railway station platforms are made of polished concrete blocks, utterly unyielding and impenetrable, not the asphalt i was used to in Australia. Four of my fingernails were stripped from my fingers and one finger broke in the force of my terror. I never even felt that physical trauma, the first i knew about it was when a nurse was washing, dressing and bandaging my hand at Krankenhaus Köpenick where i was taken afterwards. But the most terrifying thing was something i have never read about psychosis and which i now feel deeply in my bones must be a terrifying part of the experience of many who suffer psychosis: i had little, fleeting glimpses of lucidity wherein i was actually aware, at least partially, that i was having a psychosis, yet i had no way of telling what was real and what was psychotic. I cannot put into words how terrifying those flashes of lucidity were, and then the feeling of their slipping away as one plunged once more into deep psychosis. I fancy now that this is how we die: our last terrified thoughts like those flashes of lucidity that apprehends reality’s slipping inexorably away before we plunge into the void. The conviction that my last moments will be like that terrifying experience left me in shock for weeks after the psychosis.
But a man sat down beside me. He bad me come sit in a more dignified place on one of the platform benches: “einem würdigeren Ort” — i remember how the musicality of those words, how sweetly he said them and how their deeply compelling meaning snatched my attention fleetingly from my terror. But i was terrified of leaving the ground and told him so. So, listening to me, he sat down, crosslegged on the filthy platform, and told me his name — David — and asked mine. He constantly did this, and repeated told me that he was going nowhere until help arrived. Addressing me constantly and kindly by my name. It sounded so soothing to hear him do that. I had only recently told my workmates of my coming out, so the sound of “Selene” during my formal work day held a special power for me. He told me he had called the Rettungsdienst and that paramedics would soon be here to protect me. But those three words, “einem würdigeren Ort”, filled my head with an idea of somewhere — anywhere away from where i was — that was safe and nurturing. Somewhere over the rainbow. Somehow, almost as though by magic, David chose the precise three words i think i so needed to hear to halt my downfall into madness. Even though not in my mother tongue, those three words gave shape to such a shining concept of hope, and they fell together as though wrought by a guardian angel poet. As psychosis slowly let go its steely grip, i noticed how lovely David smelt, and his suit smelt rather expensive. Yet he sat down on the filthy ground. My clothes were torn and so stained by the greasy surface that i had to throw them away: i daresay he had to do the same with his. I found myself snuggling against his leg and he stroked my hair: gently, kindly, as one would a tiny child. Indeed, in my terror i felt so vulnerable and regressed like a little child: an experience i had never had. “Ein würdigerer Ort” — i was there, somewhere over the rainbow. A filthy, trampled upon train station platform, most wondrously transformed into that sublime safe place by the simple kindness of a stranger. At last the paramedics came: David had a hushed conversation with them, and i realized from the snippets i heard that he must have been some kind of doctor, as i suddenly recalled his asking whether i had taken anything. That must have been towards the end of his time with me just before the paramedics came, because i recall i could answer precisely what i had taken, how much and why. “Schwerer Scheiß”, he responded kindly, jokingly with a little smile, stroking a lock of my hair one last time before looking at me earnestly and directly, rolling his eyes a little as he did so, and saying, “I think your doctor could revise your medication, particularly given you’ve never had anxiolytics before, please talk to her about it”. Up till that last farewell statement, he spoke to me as he would a child patient, but it did not feel patronizing in the least; on the contrary, it was so, so soothing, wholly apposite to my state of mind and what i had just been through. That sudden shift into grownup speak at the end showed how well he was attuned to me, how unpatronizing he was. He vanished into the cold, sleety Berlin night, expecting nothing in return. He got nothing but almost certainly a bill for a new suit. I had no way of thanking him for his kindness. Likewise the paramedics where professional, but gentle and candid in their care. Even the passengers disrupted by a crazy woman having a tanti on a crowded platform were kind and respectful: giving me space and heeding the little sanctuary around me that one paramedic had created to shield me from being trampled. Bahnhof Adlershof at 6pm is not exactly a convenient place for someone to have a psychotic episode. I disrupted the evening of many travellers.
As i look back on that two years ago, i think of David, the paramedics, the Adlershof passengers and their kindness. Why i was in my state was of no importance to these people: they cared only to help and not to judge. They didn’t care about how they would appear to others in helping a crazy woman. No strict miserly meters throttled their empathy, no judgement was made as to whether i were deserving of help, no hangups about appearances held them back. All that mattered to David and those others was simply that i needed help. To them i was profoundly deserving of help, simply by dint of my humanity, my sentience and my pain.
The kindness of people is indeed alive if we look for it.
