I have an empathy for Pinocchio. I have spent most of my life lying about who I really am and I always wanted to be a real boy. But that will never happen for me. My youth is over and I am transgender.
It was not a word used when I was young. My male brain inside my female body was completely trapped and unseen. I grew up in an age where gender barriers were strongly fixed. Playing football with boys out in the fields drew the label “tomboy”. Scowling at my parents for attempting to gender dress me, created a withdrawn, angry child.
By the time I was a teen, I was suicidal, had no place to belong and no word for my existence. Faced with a binary society, I became binary. I lived to the dictates of my outer body. I married, had children and hid my emotions from everyone. I was consumed by this lie. It was life within the whale. I was hidden from the world.
Life and society have advanced liberally since my childhood. There are now celebrities who are transsexual. There are now programmes about the lives of people like me. However, they are not really like me.
The programmes I see are about those who have had the sex-change. They have transformed their appearance to live their inner man or woman. Beautifully, for them, they have released their trapped gender into the world.
There are many times I have envied their decision to change. They have found a place in society. They are now binary (either male or female). They are not that murky, unseen existence in between. They can take their place among the others in our binary society.
Recently, I have embraced my transgender label and the curious mix of female body and male gender that is me. However, writing two books on the issue and giving talks, I have encountered a worrying trend. I am not making some people happy, advocating self-acceptance for my duality.
Some would prefer me to advocate that the only relief for a transgender person is to have a sex-change and become a transsexual. Instead, I am advocating that being this way can be a life worth preserving and not all of us need to have the sex-change to be happy if we are given the right support by society.
In North America, the native inhabitants have actually embraced the duality of transgender people for centuries. They call us “two-spirit” people as we do not fit into either male or female. I think this is a holistic way of looking at transgender. It does not define us as people who are dysmorphic or disordered but as valuable, equal members of society. Our society does not have that fluidity yet.
This difference in opinion, for my embracing the existence of being transgender, actually manifested in a debate about the word “transgender”. In an advert for a talk I was giving, I used it as a noun. This was met with some disapproval. In the dictionary, it is indeed an adjective, as my critics responded. The disapproval disappointed me greatly.
To be a boy or a girl is a noun, but to exist as a transgender is not worthy of a “noun”. It is an adjective. It is an adjective like being happy or sad or disordered. It is something which is therefore not fixed and permanent but something which can be changed or transformed.
What message are we giving young transgender children who are looking for self-acceptance and societal acceptance, if we are telling them that their state of existence is an adjective but if they become a transsexual they will become something of permanence. The word transsexual is a noun.
I have lived 56 years as a transgender and some of those years have been extremely painful, mostly because I had no place in a world that only saw male and female as a sex or gender.
I am happy that society has moved forward so dramatically recently as to allow same-sex marriages and other equalities to those who were once marginalised. But I do not wish to sit quietly now to see my existence confined to an adjectival response. I do exist. I am worthy of a place in society and I am definitely going to fight for my place at the table. I do not have to become a transsexual to achieve acceptance or happiness.
Pinocchio became a real boy. He was awarded this existence for his good deeds by the fairy. He transformed from one state to another. Does the story teach us self-acceptance? Sometimes I think it is sad that he didn’t stay a puppet, a nod to the ability of his maker, Gepetto, and a realisation that he was perfect in his own way.
