Five Years In
A look back at the year we ran out of toilet paper, the politics of “us vs. them,” and my ongoing gender journey
Happy New Year! I’ve somehow managed to survive 2020, despite almost a whole year of bad news; this has seemed at times to be one of the Universe’s more determined attempts to put me in an early grave. Or, I’ll always remember 2020 as the year that Pauline and I were stuck at home with no toilet paper for months on end. I suspect that 2020 will most certainly not become one of those years that most of us will be eagerly re-living in our old age, sitting around a scrabble table in some assisted-living facility, and showing off our 1970s and ’80s family vacation photo albums to nurses who weren’t even born until after the beginning of the 21st Century.
“2020”: just the sound of it sends a shiver down my spine, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It started out with the appearance of a new and deadly respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2, which went on to become the worst public health crisis world-wide since the H1N1 type A “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918–1920. Then, on top of COVID-19 — as if that plague wasn’t bad enough — Americans experienced one of the most divisive Presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen. And it’s still not over! It is 7:00pm on January 6, 2021 as I write this, and earlier today, a huge crowd of Pro-Trump rally attendees rioted, and stormed the US Capitol building.
This is the first time that the Capitol Building has been overrun by “hostile forces” since the 1814 burning of Washington, DC, by the British Army during the War of 1812. And it was done by Americans, not the armed forces of an enemy nation, not by foreign terrorists, but by “just plain Americans”; people who I always thought of as neighbors, people who weren’t much different from me.
Five people are dead: one Capitol Police officer, Brian D. Sicknick, who was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher, and died later of an apparent stroke or cerebral hemorrhage, and four protestors. One of these was a woman, Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt, age 35, who was shot by a Capitol guard as she attempted to climb through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby, adjacent to the House Chamber. At least one other guard also fired a handgun into the crowd in the Capitol Rotunda, but apparently the bullet didn’t hit anyone, thank God for small favors. Sixty Capitol Police officers were injured in the riot, of whom 15 were hospitalized and one was in critical condition; all had been released from the hospital by January 11. Additionally, rioters injured more than 58 D.C. Metro police officers during the attack, including one who remained hospitalized five days after the attack.
I am not a supporter of President Trump, but I also don’t like the idea of otherwise innocent people being killed by LEO’s, even if they are (in my opinion) misguided, and I don’t believe in the political point of view they espouse. This incident speaks well of the training and good judgement of most professional LEO’s, that this riot didn’t turn into a massacre, with perhaps dozens of protestors shot down. It has been reported that some protesters were armed with lead pipes, with which they beat Capitol Police and DC Metro Police during the rioting.
In my 64 years, I’ve seen a lot of nasty political campaigning, and election results that sometimes defied comprehension. For example, in 1968, Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey by a razor-thin 43.4% to 42.7% of the popular vote, yet won 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191. Independent George Wallace, former Governor of Alabama, took 46 electoral votes in that election, basically most of the Deep South states.
When I studied this election later, in high school in the early ‘70’s, this seemed insane, as I didn’t yet understand that the electoral college gives small-population rural states extra delegates based on the “two Senators per state, no matter how small they are” language of the Constitution.
Then in 1972, despite years of ever-growing Vietnam War protests and civil unrest, Nixon won re-election in a landslide, only to have his Administration destroyed, and his very name disgraced for a generation, by the Watergate scandal in 1973. And this situation — the popular vote way out of balance with the Electoral College vote — has been repeated a few times since then. With the political landscape of America looking like it has been the last 4 years, between the Presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020, I wonder and worry if my country will ever feel “United” again.
America was torn apart for a whole decade — 1963 to 1973 more or less — by the Kennedy and King assassinations, racial tensions and riots, and above all else, unrest over the ever-growing American involvement in the Vietnam War. That decade of terrible times ended with the economy severely damaged by the OPEC Oil Embargo, the aftermath of which both launched Jimmy Carter into the White House, and four years later, got him recalled when his administration proved unable to cope with the economic fallout of both the oil embargo and the federal government’s enormous debts from more than 10 years involvement in the Vietnam War.
Year after year, it seems like the American people have become ever more polarized, with the political terrain between Red and Blue becoming a No Man’s Land, and no ground left anywhere for centrists and moderates to have a conversation about how to make America a place where everybody can thrive.
On January 20th, Joe Biden will become the 13th president of the United States that I’ve lived under, and after 4 years of one of the most actively anti-LGBTQ Administrations I’ve ever seen, I feel a tangible sense of relief. What happened to the America that I was born into, where men like Dwight Eisenhower led the nation, a man who dedicated his life to service, and who the American people, and world leaders everywhere, could at least respect, no matter what their political persuasions?
But of course politics was only one of the horrors visited on us last year. As Roseanne Rosanna Dana (Gilda Radner) used to say on Saturday Night Live, “It’s Always Something!”, and for most of 2020, of course, that “something” has been COVID-19.
In just four weeks, it will be a full year since I heard the first reports of a nasty new respiratory virus spreading around Europe, from a source believed to be in China. All through February, the news reports on the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus got more and more anxious, and cases started appearing in the Pacific Northwest and urban areas in California. New York City was already dealing with a full-on avalanche of COVID cases, and on March 15th, California’s Department of Public Health recommended a full lockdown to Governor Gavin Newsom, which he agreed with.
For 10 weeks last spring, from March 15th through Memorial Day weekend, all non-essential businesses and schools were closed in the worst-affected counties, and everyone went into “shelter-in-place” at home.
So, we hunkered down, to wait and see if minimizing personal contact might result in COVID dying out on its own. Over the Memorial Day weekend, California’s State Parks, which had been closed since March, re-opened, and in June, a “limited re-opening” of restaurants and bars was tried.
We all saw the result of that: the infection rate exploded in July and August. Another lockdown, to which public reaction and compliance was lukewarm at best, and now that it’s January 2021, we no longer have hot summer weather to at least somewhat curb the airborne transmission of the virus. COVID-19 is completely out of control all across the country, and hospitals and ICUs are stretched beyond capacity in many large cities. California is once again in lockdown, and we are all waiting and praying that the three vaccines that have been approved for distribution in the US are effective.
So this is where my life’s journey is: “On Hold”, or “in suspended animation” if you prefer, as we all wait and hope for an end, or at least a beginning of an end, to the COVID pandemic sometime in 2021.
In case you were wondering, “I thought this publication was Gender From The Trenches? When is she going to inject some gender stuff into this blog?”, I’m now ready to move on to the gender talk.
Next week, on January 9th, I will pass a milestone of sorts: the 5th anniversary of my “coming out” as a transgender woman. This was the night of my first River City Gems social event, a dinner party at a private home — Costco lasagne and salad, with garlic bread — and it was not only the first time I ever presented to other people en femme, i.e. dressed in woman’s clothing, it was only the third time I ever admitted to anyone else that I even had gender issues (the first time had been 31 years previously, in January 1985, and the second time, in 1992, to my wife Lynn).
Five months after that Gems event, on June 4th, I faced my final identity crisis and committed myself to transition. I’ve written about that “transition-or-die” moment in my other blogs here on Medium, so I won’t re-hash that event here.
At the time, I thought to myself, “I’ve finally done it! Transition! I get to live the rest of my life as Laura-Ann, and I’ll never have to hide again!” And I assumed, as I suppose a lot of transgender people do, that my life would “change” somehow, change in ways so unexpected and profound that I couldn’t even conceive of them at the time.
“Yeah, right,” I can hear some of you muttering under your breath, especially those of you who transitioned ten years ago or more.
Sure, there were changes: I made a lot of new friends. My relationship with my daughter actually got better post-transition, much better really. I changed my legal name and gender marker, and I started thinking of myself as Laura-Ann, a late-middle-age woman, and not as Larry any more. I went through three years of therapy and finally found peace and closure (more-or-less) from my childhood PTSD and the grief of losing my wife in 2013.
I take female hormones, and I’ve had an orchiectomy. Goodbye testosterone, and hello estrogen! And I’m happy that I did these things; being Laura-Ann feels very nice. It’s a “peaceful easy feeling,” to borrow a line from one of my favorite Eagles songs, and I am a better human being for it.
But several times recently, often while I have been working in my kitchen on food prep, or doing repairs around my house (last week, I rebuilt two sections of fencing that got smashed in a car accident on my street), I have been struck by feelings of “reverse gender dysphoria,” if you can wrap your head around such a weird idea. Doing that fence repair, I felt no “different” inside than I had in 2003 when I built that fence, except for the fact that I’m a lot older, and not as strong as I was back then. Four-and-a-half years of estrogen therapy has robbed me of some of my upper body strength, and the arthritis in my hips and shoulders is getting to the point that it’s really restricting what I can do physically. You’d think, after struggling for 54 years to overcome chronic depression and self-loathing, that I would be ecstatic to finally find happiness in my own skin, and give up wondering “who am I, really”?
And this is strange for its timing: to have these unsettled, questioning feelings still bothering me five years after transition. I began this journey to uncage Laura-Ann from the dungeon I had been hiding her in since I was five years old, and to find acceptance within myself of what Lynn had been telling me for 28 years, and what Pauline has been telling me since we started dating at the end of 2016: that I was, and am, a good human being, worthy of being loved, even by myself.
And I know what’s bothering me: the fact that a lot less has changed in my life, and in my perception of myself, during these five years since I began my transition, than I thought it would. I had a long talk with my life-partner Pauline about this a few nights ago over dinner, and she echoed my own words back at me: “You didn’t transition because you were trying to become someone else; you were trying to quit pretending to be ‘a guy’, and allow yourself to be Laura-Ann, after suppressing that truth for 54 years.” Heaven knows I’ve written enough about this in my other blogs, that you would think I’d have taken it to heart by now.
So why am I still waiting for some magic transformation? As if some sub-conscious part of me expects that sticking estrogen patches on my tummy every week is going to turn me into a Disney Princess? Maybe I should try kissing a frog (ewww).
As I mentioned earlier, we have been in lockdown almost 10 months now, and I have too much time on my hands with nothing to do but sit and think about… myself. Without the outer manifestations of the clothing that I feel most comfortable in nowadays, typically an A-line skirt, mid-calf or ankle length, and a short-sleeve blouse or shirt, I don’t look any different than I did in 2012, the last full year of my marriage to Lynn.
My hair is longer, and it seems even thinner and wispier than it did then. I’m wearing eyeglasses with frame styles that are more feminine than the safety-frame glasses that I had while working as a land-survey technician on a field crew before I retired. I’m still fat, and it’s looking less and less likely, as I approach the mid-point of my 60’s, that I’ll ever be able to lose enough weight to get my gender confirmation surgery.
Being confined to the house during this COVID lockdown isn’t helping me get any exercise, and I haven’t lost any of my appetite, despite the avalanche of bad news bombarding all of us every day, as the pandemic gets ever worse, with wide-spread vaccination still at least 3 months away. The wrinkles at the corners of my eyes are getting deeper. And it’s not visible, but the arthritis in my hips, knees, and shoulders is getting slowly worse, year by year, and intruding ever more into my ability to do physical tasks.
I still enjoy the things I have always loved: the music from my youth 40 years ago that I still love to sing at karaoke: The Eagles, Elton John, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Don Williams, and Gordon Lightfoot among many others. I still love my 22 year old pickup truck, although I do most of my running around in a Prius as my daily driver nowadays. Motor vehicles! I’ve had a driver’s license since 1974, that’s 46 years more or less, and in all those years, I’ve had so many vehicles pass through my hands that I can hardly remember all of them.
I just made a list from memory, and there are 31 road vehicles, including at least 15 cars, 5 pickup trucks, 4 Econoline vans, and 7 different motorcycles. I was never into ATV’s, or I’d probably have a bunch of those on my list, too. And I’ve owned 5 boats, one of which I still have, a 1988 Catalina 25 sailboat.
Cars and boats have been a hobby of mine since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been obsessed with squeezing as many miles out of a gallon of gasoline in my cars as possible. My plug-in Prius (I’ve named her “Tina,” after a Robert A. Heinlein character), is pretty good at the hyper-miling game; in the 18 months I’ve owned the car, I’ve averaged 160 mpg in her by using external battery charging as much as possible.
Although I have to say, my Prius is just plain white, not robin’s egg blue. People who think that Prius’s are wimpy cars mostly driven by snowflakes (especially light-blue ones), love to joke about them: “You’re driving a Prius? That’s so gay!” Just watch Jeff Dunham and Peanut in “Spark of Insanity,” for example.
So, I’ve owned everything from a Prius, to a 3/4 ton Dodge Cummins diesel pickup truck. If car preferences are supposed to say something about the owner’s personality, I can’t imagine what the stable of vehicles I’ve owned is supposed to say about me, other than perhaps I have a tendency to get bored with some of my cars pretty quickly. Which of them were “guy cars,” and which were “girly cars?” Who can say?
Food: Too much of that passes my lips, too, as can be told by anyone who lays eyes on me. I still love just about any edible item with chocolate in it. I still feel most empowered when I have a camera in my hands and something lovely in front of me to photograph with it. I still love cuddling with a warm cat curled up on my chest, and snuggling with my life-partner for a few minutes before bedtime — a tradition I held for 28 years with Lynn and am happy to continue now with Pauline.
So, despite 5 years of trying to divide “him” from “her,” and find nice, neat pigeonholes into which I can compartmentalize my gender-related thoughts and feelings, I look at my life today with far more questions still unanswered than I ever thought I would have at age 64.
“I now realize that what defines a human being is not the gathering of answers, but the never-ending development of new questions.”
When my Dad was 64, I was 24, and had only been living on my own for 3 years. Dad seemed to me to be a veritable Oracle of Delphi, a fount of all the wisdom a human being could ever hope to amass. And I probably supposed that Dad had long since found the answers to every question, and the solution to every problem that he had ever faced.
I now realize that what defines a human being is not the gathering of answers, but the never-ending development of new questions. For from those questions comes growth, and growth is life. When we stop growing, stop learning, stop asking questions, we cease to live and begin the process of dying.
And the box into which I thought I had locked my former self, that “him” named Larry, on June 4th, 2016, the day I committed to transition? What about that box? How solid, truly, was that separation? How secure the containment? I can now see that “Larry’s Box” was about as secure as a cardboard carton left out in the rain. It’s dissolving right in front of my eyes, and when I open the top and look inside, what do you know, there I am!
Not as a “him,” as if that former self was something alien and to be feared, and not precisely and exclusively a “her,” either. Whatever my unrealistic expectations of what a transgender woman ought to be (glamorous, svelte, a well-endowed “10”, with enough hair to make Rapunzel envious), that’s for-sure not the person in the box.
It’s just “me,” Laura-Ann, old and grey, hair thinning and turning brittle as dry grass in late summer, and more than a little worn and frayed around the edges.
The label says “Laura-Ann,” but Larry’s characteristics are still surprisingly visible, as if they were written in chalk on a blackboard that was only hastily erased. Imagine yourself as a 4th grader, anxious to head home on the last day of school before summer vacation, and Teacher asks you to erase the blackboard on your way out. I kinda expect that next September, when kids file back into that classroom, that long-division problem, that list of state capitals, the summer book reading list, or whatever it was that you were supposed to erase on that blackboard, will still be pretty much readable.
Everything changed on the evening that I committed to transition, yet nothing changed. Nothing really earth-shattering, anyway. The only thing that changed that was of true significance, was that I let go of being afraid of who I am, and made a choice to live openly as myself, a transgender woman.
What that means to me is probably not exactly the same as what it means to other, maybe younger transgender people, especially those who were able to transition socially in childhood. You young trans people with parents who let you socially transition at age 5, get on blockers when you were 12, start taking HRT when you were 16, and have your GCS when you were 18, you will grow up with few, if any memories of having been any other gender. Maybe you won’t still be in therapy when you are 60, re-living memories of having to cope with hostile schoolmates who shunned you, called you horrible names, and later having to earn a living for decades as “someone else,” while trying to cope with chronic depression and gender dysphoria.
Maybe some of you will still be wondering later in life, about all the “what-if’s” that seem to plague trans people. I will always wonder, in regard to you young people who get to transition early, like at age 18 or even sooner: did any of you ever lie awake at night, trying to think of a way around what the hormone therapy was doing to your reproductive organs? Knowing that those hormones would sterilize you, even if you put off gender re-assignment surgery for a few years to accumulate the money to pay for it, or for some other personal reason? Or did you just shrug and say to yourself, “I’ll adopt a child when it’s time to start a family?”
My own daughter is adopted; I never had a biological child and don’t have any regrets. I love my daughter as fiercely as I would if she shared genes with me. I wasn’t emotionally ready to be a parent for many years after I supposedly became an “adult”, and I suspect that, if I had met someone and started a family when I was 21, I wouldn’t have been all that great as a Dad. Maybe things work out for the best, even when we can’t see ahead with any certainty, to verify that the path we are walking is going somewhere that we want it to.
I lived as Larry for a long, long time, 59 years, and I have had to accept that Laura-Ann is basically just Larry with the “male” serial numbers filed off, and a new label, written in Sharpie pen on a post-it note, stuck on rather haphazardly and held in place with a layer of Scotch tape applied over it.
But I don’t feel all that bad about this. My friend Sabrina, who is a graphic artist in Vancouver, BC, wrote a 6-panel comic about her own Transition a few years ago: In the last two panels, she sums up the angst of several years of struggle with the effort of reconciling her former gender with her chosen one, by saying that she realized finally that her former self wasn’t really gone, that “All his best parts live on in me.”
In the last panel she shows herself, standing on a beach at the shoreline, holding hands with the ghost of her former male self, and throwing something into the water, “and the only part we threw away was the sadness we had to carry for all those years.” This comic is posted here on Facebook.
Anyway, if you’ve read this blog all the way to this point, I thank you, and I would like to wish you in person, a happy and prosperous New Year. With any luck, the vaccines will be in full distribution no later than April, so that we can enjoy a reasonably safe return to summer-time fun activities like picnics. And so that I can see my daughter and grandkids before they are too old to want to give me a hug. And maybe, just maybe, so that I can go to the grocery store for my weekly shopping and not have to wonder, “will they have any paper towels and toilet paper this week?” Namaste!
