Pronunciation and Pronouns

A couple weeks back I turned fifty-three, putting me at the younger end of the Te Reo Māori class that I have come to love. It is a weekly two-hour class in the bustling city suburb of Newmarket. The drive there is always doubled on the way home by the kids clambering out of the surrounding schools. The accumulated affluence is presented in queues of opulent cars parked on yellow lines, sensor-operated doors opening and school bags flying through onto ergonomically designed seats. Kids pile into cars more orderly than I ever managed to, and before their feet touch the floor mats their devices are out and they continue to work on their forward head posture. 

Other than a course back in February I’ve not been in the classroom for some time, either as a student or teacher, so I was curious about how it would all land. With only being three months into my transition, and already with daily ignorant and arrogant transphobic experiences to navigate, I gave myself the option of quitting.

But from the moment I took my seat I felt welcome in a class that had already completed one term together. I can’t remember the last time I genuinely experienced that. I get to appreciate it more deeply for the belonging that is absent elsewhere. I realised recently that you don’t need to know you are trans to be invisible, to know that you do not belong. Perhaps younger trans folk won’t relate to the pathologising of invisibility so much, particularly if they live in families and groups of friends that are affirming and supportive. They are visible and they are seen, which is wonderful. So they are less likely to be transitioning at fifty-three and unable to access their needs for all the red tape and bureaucratic bullshit. They haven’t had to wait fifty-three years and I think they are more likely to have a support team around them or have access to one, but I suspect they will still have their own experiences of red tape, patholgising and dehumanising.

For me though, I have been pathologised, dehumanised, misdiagnosed and labelled my whole life regardless of my ‘courtesy title’ or where I was, consciously or unconsciously, on the trans-journey. There is a snowball effect of invisibility that leaves you gaslit, traumatised and alone. It happens in our families, our schools, our workplaces, our health systems. It happens everywhere we are. It is a crazy-making revolving door that knocks you off your feet before you have fully gotten back up, over and over, and people die.

There is no urgency until those with power live the experiences that leave us housebound.  

Ironically when you eventually have a trauma response (which is a completely ordinary and a most natural human response) to this invisibility and the treatment it denies you, you are then pathologised as difficult, angry, crazy, catastrophising, neurotic etc. It becomes impossible, and you are further pathologised for your response to the impossible

There is a lot of confusion around transitioning later in life, but there are few people willing or wanting to ask me why I am. Which is a shame as I have the answer (for me). Not the GP’s, psychologists or psychiatrists. Unless they are trans and transitioning later in life, they do not have the knowledge to begin to answer this question. They do not have the knowledge and lived experience to do presentations at conferences that talk on behalf of trans people. They do not have the knowledge to know us better than we know ourselves, that assumption is kept for the narcissists we have known. My voice is strong and fully functional, although granted there are times where it has become worn out, from when I’ve been screaming and no one could hear me.

My answer is simple and simultaneously complex. Invisibility. Being trans in a world that had no place for me. It has taken me fifty plus years to navigate that invisibility. To unpack, and begin to heal and recover from that invisibility. To a point it was safe enough for me to begin to see myself. I am not claiming to own the rights to minority stress, prejudice or the harm that comes from fundamentalist silent hostility, I am just talking to my lived experience. 

When you are, from birth, in-between the only designated options, you learn to mask your in-between-ness. It is a natural state of survival as the alternative consequences can be unthinkable. You are the ball in a pinball machine, there is nowhere to rest, from time to time you fall into a small hole and think you have finally found your place of stillness and belonging, but a spring is activated and spits you out and back into bouncing off objects and being hit with the paddles operated by those with the power.

I think our bodies know we are trans from the beginning of our time on this planet. That is why we don’t need to know it in our thoughts to be invisible in this world. And then once we do know we are trans it is toxically offensive and patronising to be interrogated and forced to convince anyone what our bodies have always known. Add to that the discrimination of being the only group of people required to undergo expensive assessments to prove further clarification of what is brutally obvious in the body dysphoria that has us housebound. 

I have lived a (trauma induced) dissociated life, with a strong and agitating felt sense of invisibility that I was unable to articulate or understand. The distress and confusion was pathologised and I was labelled, over and over, by many. I never could quite reach the place where the words lay, until after many years of work to understand my distress, the thoughts and words finally landed. First in metaphors in lyrics and art.

Only then did my life begin and the first obstacle was the inconvenience that being trans created for other people. I have spent my entire life travelling to this wonderful place only to find that most people, and far more people than I could have ever imagined possible, would love me to remain invisible. In fact their behaviour demanded it. 

That has been the hardest part of transitioning. The medical transition is wonderful, it is the social transition that is brutal and unforgiving - people's hostile silence; fear and ignorance; tolerance dressed up as acceptance. 

The Te Reo Māori class was an exceptional example of gender affirmation. I suspect it was in part because the culture of that classroom encouraged and supported mistakes, so people had more of a capacity to lean into things unconsciously that they might otherwise have not looked at. It was ok to get things wrong, pronunciation and pronouns alike. If there is a softness for error then we can be kinder to ourselves and allow for a less rigid posture of thought and feeling, words and sharing.

I have always felt what was in the room but it was only earlier this year that I made the connection to the distress I have felt in groups over the years. I know by the body sensations I sit with, how open the space is for me to be me, or not.

I now wonder for a cis gendered person who has never known the in-between-ness of being trans in a world made binary by binary people, that it may be very challenging or impossible for them to have an awareness of their own transphobia. It is just not a thought yet. Just as for years I was unable to think the thought that I was trans, they are unable to think the thoughts that they are transphobic. It goes some way to explaining their verbal oddities and territorial transversing that happens before the words have fully left the tip of my tongue – “I am trans”. And no amount of joy in my smiling eyes tethers their discomfort and need to claim ownership of who they believe I am.

The exception to this ‘transphobic unawareness’ being the blatant hatred and hostility presented by people that are very comfortable with their transphobic label and wear it as more of a badge of superiority. Further adding to their predictable and clanging ignorance. 

The assignment for the Te Reo Māori class was to write a short story with past, present and future tense. My story tenses were inspired by the Olympics that are about to happen in Paris. Although the idea was immediately denied within me for the attention and visibility it brings to things I have done, which comes in the shadow of New Zealand socialisation to dare not talk of the things we do – as if it is some healthy form of humility, when it is just self-deprecating bullshit that serves to reinforce the removal of our agency. 

So reflecting further and briefly considering the people that are offended by gratitude and celebration of lived experience, I decided it was even more important to write this short story, as a counter to that mind-numbing indoctrinated cage of bigotry.

I ngā tau takau ma rua ki muri 

I tuhi ahau te waiata Taumāhekeheke o Te Ao mō Aotearoa.

I whakaari ahau te waiata ki London.

I mau te weweru wahine

I mau ngā hū teitei o te wahine.

Inaianei Kei te waiata oro hōhonu ahau

Nā te mea

He tāne iawhiti ahau

E whakawhiti ana ahau

Ā tērā mārama 

Kaore te weweru

Kāore ngā hū teitei

Ka waiata oro raro ahau

My rough translation - Twelve years ago I wrote the NZ Olympic Song. I performed it in London, I wore a dress and heels. Now my singing is lower, that is because I am a trans dude and I am transitioning. Next month (July) I won’t be wearing a dress or heels and my voice will be deeper still! (Hooray!)  

In closing, the extent of the warmth felt in that Te Reo Māori classroom is described best in the form of a chat on the last day of class, as we were arriving and before we each read our short stories to the class.  

During the conversation - that delved into the horrors of retaining each learnt lesson beyond the class and into the next day - my classmate, who I suspect has 30 years on me, simply asked, 

“So, how’s it all going?”. 

We chatted briefly about how wonderful it is to have gender affirming care in the form of testosterone. I told her how exciting it is to have muscle development, particularly in my neck and shoulders, and when I saw she was curious and interested in my weight training progress I invited her to feel my ‘bulging biceps’. She lent in and was appropriately impressed as we chuckled away. 

Perhaps we all just need to be embodied, more at peace within our own bodies so that we are able to turn to the person sitting next to us, and simply say,

“So, how’s it all going?”

And then, not be afraid.