Transsexuality and Consolidation: A Year of Living Transformationally

The main point of this ‘article’ or report is to illustrate how my decision to commit to a Real Life Experience (RLE) for the purpose of modifying a troublesome "neurosis" was incidental, yet instrumental if not key to the eventual success of the process of analysis and individuation I had undertaken about twenty years prior to this writing when I inadvertently discovered that I was disassociated, fragmented; an emotionally unstable psychological time bomb 'going off' all over the place. Had I not committed to this Real Life Experience, it is decidedly moot as to whether or no I would have achieved the ‘stable wholeness’ or ‘consolidation of self’ that I believe I am now experiencing.

"Bond of Union," M.C.Escher 

This piece is also meant to be subjective, not theoretical. I have red a lot of material on what I possibly might be going thru, but I have yet to hear or read from anyone anyone who is writing that material espouse a personal experience in this regard. It’s all theory, and academic in the extreme. This is not theory. This is what happened, and is happening to me. I the following, I shall try to correlate my experience to the material that i have so far come across in the literature and research so far available to me.

Consolidation of self is the desired result of any process of self-identification and integration or individuation with a bent towards eventual psychological wellbeing. Despite all my efforts and years spent in this endeavour, I had really gotten nowhere with regard to this singular objective. While I had achieved some significant changes in my behavior and outlook, I was no nearer ultimate integration or wholeness or consolidation or whatever than when I had started. I didn’t know this at the time, but that was the fact of the matter. After all the therapies of varied stripe I had tried, I was still no more than an ad hoc collection of parts of myself, all jumbled together like a bag of unruly kittens and puppy dogs, with a pesky varmint or two thrown in. Thing was, knowing no better, and having done so much work on the various complexes and neuroses that had been so prevalent in my life, I still thought I was whole. I didn’t feel fragmented, or not myself. Little did I know.

In 2009, after having tried unsuccessfully to put myself out of my misery a few times, I was enrolled in a workshop on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I had heard about PTSD a couple of years prior, had understood that it dealt with anxiety and stress in adults dealing with major trauma or shell shock type situations, and thought it relevant to the unprocessed anxiety I had accumulated as a child. During the workshop I learned about ‘mindfulness’ and ‘grounding,’ two techniques for dealing with stress and the attendant manifestations of the afflicted thereof: triggering, disassociation, fight/flight reactions, anxiety, and what have you. At the time, I was also reading “Eastern Body, Western Mind,” by Anodea Judith. In it, Judith “employs the metaphoric language of the chakra system within the context of modern psychology,” and in reading it I encountered the concept of, ‘you are not your emotions.’ My engaging in a combination of these concepts and techniques resulted in my discovering that I could finally do something significant about the anger issues I had been dealing with more or less unsuccessfully over the past 20 or so years. Within months I had modified my anger behavior significantly and I knew I was on the right track.

The realization of this was like opening a time capsule. 20 year or so earlier, as part of all the work I was doing on myself, I had qualified for Sexual Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and had started on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). I had been wrestling with gender dysphoria all my life, and had at that time decided a sex change was the way to go. Trouble was the medications involved seemed to be inflaming my volatile moods and expressions, and to an extreme and uncomfortable degree. Given this, I thought the anger issue to be of a higher priority than the gender issue and decided to halt the HRT therapy until I had worked out the anger thing. The upshot of all of this was that twenty years later, when I realized that I was on the right path in this regard, I also realized that I could resume my gender work if I so wanted. As I had not put this troublesome aspect of myself to rest, I did, but with an added perspective. I was now quite inclined to think that this issue was something else other than a gender issue, a neurosis or complex, something that just needed the right analysis or procedure to resolve. So i proceeded to do just that.

What I now envisioned was that, having employed a similar tactic before with other neuroses i.e. kleptomania, smoking, etc, if I ‘allowed’ myself the space to once again to entertain the notion of a sex change, then chances were that at some point during the process, the whole thing being basically a neurosis, I would organically unearth the underlying causes of my 'gender dysphoria,' and the presenting behavior would disappear from my life like a desert mirage, or a bad dream, as had the kleptomania and smoking and such that had been such a big part of my earlier life. The question was, was I indeed in the throws of some deep seated neurosis or complex having to do with my mother’s abandonment of me, or perhaps regarding some unrealized jealousy of my sister and her relationship with our mother? This behavioral path of acceptance approach seemed to be the way to go.

"TRANSITION"

by Suzanne Cheryl Gardner

And so I now once again embarked upon the process of becoming a woman, albeit with this different focus. And it was essential to commit 100% to the whole thing. Only by doing that would I succeed in this venture. And in order to qualify for SRS under our Medical Service Plan in BC (MSP), one has to engage in the Real Life Experience process living as a woman for a year before one can qualify for SRS. So, I started presenting as a woman, dressing as a woman, undergoing psychiatric assessment and monitoring, with an eye towards Hormone Replacement Therapy and eventual Sexual Reassignment Surgery. I gave it my all, so confident was I in the efficacy of this approach that had worked so well for me in the past.

However, I also realized after a while that underneath all this certainty, I was also ambivalent about the whole thing. It seemed I was actually worried that I would succeed in this regard, that I would find the hidden ‘key’ to this neurosis, this thing I had longed for my entire life and also feared to no small degree, and that it would dissolve into nothing, leaving me somehow… incomplete, somehow less than I was before. It was an odd place to be, having for so long wanted to do rid myself of this inconvenient and seemingly irrational facet of my being, to find myself not wanting the outcome I had pursued for so long.

However, what happened was that the more I traveled this path, the more it felt right, and the more I began to realize how important this feminine alter ego, or aspect, or whatever, was to me. It was not going away, or ‘deconstructing.’ What’s more, I was finding more and more that I didn't want it to. And, I realized as I went along, I was no longer afraid of it anymore. It was now so out in the open that I no longer had anything to hide. Or so i thought. However, something was happening here that I had not expected, and this something was somehow enhancing of my life. My sense of self certainty was growing, and my outlook was definitely changing.

All that aside, I was still the ad hoc me that I had been when I started, still not integrated, and still not knowing so. I still felt like me, but, as i was to learn, that is not always the indicator it's cracked up to be. I was getting closer to this consolidation thing than I realized, but as one knows, until the hollandaise is emulsified, it's still just a mess of butterfat and congealing egg yolk. There was still something missing. And here’s what I think catalyzed the whole thing for me, the thing that allowed the disorganized and conflicted bunch of ‘me’s’ I still was to consolidate into the 'stable whole,’ the perfect hollandaise that I believe I now am.

For years, female attire, and especially me in it, has had a profound effect upon me. Puberty put a decidedly sexual spin on this, but I am coming to the conclusion that that was just a matter of crossed wires or misapplication. The thing is, I used to get a deep down jolt, a 'frisson' that thrilled me to my very core whenever I dealt with women’s clothing in any way, and that that frisson, in retrospect, was something separate from and actually transcended the sexual arousal I came to associate with women’s clothing over the years, this sexual connection starting only at puberty as it did. And as it is now, ‘women’s’ clothing have become 'my' clothing, and I am no more turned on by my female attire than I was wearing men’s clothes. I take great delight in what I now wear freely, but that is another thing entirely, an expression of who I am, and it's own reward. And I have come to think that this ‘frisson,’ this jolt or thrill is at center of, and directly connected to “ME,” to whom I truly am, or where I truly live within myself. Indeed, somehow it was my true self, above and beyond ego and the like. Fundamental.

Now, during this year of living as a woman I had been ‘given’ the name Roxana, or Ro, by a friend. And for what it was, it sufficed. For a while. As I progressed further down my RLE, starting now on the hormone replacement part of HRT, I realized however, that this name didn’t really suit me, and that I wanted or needed something else. Over the years, I had played with several names, names like Rickie, and Sassy, and Nancy, decidedly female names that I might adopt in my attempt to incorporate this feminine streak into my masculine presentation. There was something about the ie and y endings that got to me, appellative lace and frills. Very girly. And at the same time, too girly, too frilly. Trouble was that this was too close for comfort for the biker me that was putting up with all this girly stuff, the biker me that was nominally ‘in charge’ of the whole disassociated mess that I was. A dead giveaway to ‘his’ secret. And as much as ‘he’ told 'himself' that being open about this behavior of mine, conversationally that is, academically even, was healthy and honest and part of my original attempts at consolidation, the truth was that I was still afraid, ashamed perhaps, to own this behavior in anything more than third party discussion. So while I coveted these names, I also feared them. And to boot, the word nancy had a double entendre. A nancy boy is, well, you figure it out. What it sounds like: a nancy boy, certainly not a chopper riding outlaw type. What would happen to the integrity of that persona was I was to take on this name?

Ernie Bushmiller's "Slugo and Nancy"

And there it was, that frisson once again, fear, excitement and pleasure all wrapped up in one delicious, vibrant and clear as the chime of a Tibetan singing bowl moment. All this, when I actually considered using this name Nancy. When I realized this, and that I could experience this frisson, this jolt every time somebody called me by that appellation, I realized also that that might be a good thing. A very good thing actually. And what the hell. I was no longer presenting as a biker guy anyway. I was presenting as a woman, so what was the big deal? After some initial hesitation, some waffling back and forth over side issues, I decided to go with it, to lay bare my breasts as it were.

And that is when I believe “I” consolidated and fully integrated into this stable unity that is now Nanci Blu. I am not exactly sure how long the actual consolidation took; seconds, or perhaps infinity, or somewhere in between, it being the indefinably subtle yet somehow concrete thing it turned out to be. And this transformation, this consolidation may have happened instantaneously, but the realizations, the cascading corollaries, tangential and otherwise that have been legion and frequent over the last few months as the tumblers and facets of my psyche click into place like pieces of a very intricate 3D puzzle, may have taken place while I was as yet not able to instantly process what was happening to me, so radical and yet so benign a change was it. ‘ME,’ forming into a cohesive whole, the perfect hollandaise indeed, consolidating somehow like a vague shadow emerging from a thick fog to reveal itself to be an old and cherished friend that I hadn’t seen since childhood. And I became different, and yet more me than I have ever remembered being. Whereas before I was conflicted and uncertain about so many things, I am no longer. Peace and confidence reign, and in a very organic way, a way that impacts me daily in a myriad of examples throughout my days. I no longer fight with myself or with the world in general. And whereas before I was narcissistic, now I am quite the opposite. I no longer look at the world thru the lens of my own needs, but with eyes wide open to the needs of others, and with a compassion that has taken me by surprise. And whereas before I was reactive, I am now spontaneous. Who knew these two aspects of self were different sides of the same coin. Certainly not I. And I treat people differently than I used to. Sometimes I feel like I’m channeling a big ol’ auntie, you know the stereotype, all bossy and opinionated, but with a heart of gold underneath it all, and untouchable somehow. It’s all very strange and new and I am loving it. And I now feel what I feel whereas before I was detached, and frozen.

If this is a wrong path, if this state of being I am experiencing is not ‘stable wholeness,’ or ‘consolidation of self’ or integration or real hollandaise or whatever it is that everyone ‘in the know’ seems to know something about in theory but doesn't actually seem to know experientially, then I don’t care. So be it. Who I am now is magnitudes better that what I was before. There really is no comparison. I am born again, without the extraneous hogwash of superstition and intellectual hocus pocus that so often seems to muddy the waters of this so ineffable subject. I am Nanci Blu, and that is no theory.

So there you go. What began for me as an attempt to dispel an annoying neurosis turned out to be the catalyst in the reformation or consolidation of a damaged or dis-integrated psyche, a seemingly unattainable chimera I had been chasing for years. It is my hope that the above has clarified for you what to me at least, prior to this eventuality, was little more than a vague psychological concept mixed in with some still, to me, questionable anthropomorphological hoodoo thrown in. Whereas I was “… blind, but now I see…,” and conflicted and at odds with everything, I am now working with the world, and myself. I now know who I am, and am getting to know just who that is more and more and more, day by day, moment by moment, and I am immensely delighted to be making this hitherto unexpected acquaintance with myself, thank you very much. And this life altering, spectacular event, this consolidation of self, whatever it is, happened almost in spite of myself, after looking for years for something that may have been, in the final analysis, right under my nose. Like finding love when one has long since given up on it, the last thing that one expects to encounter.

Do I even pretend to understand really what it is that has happened to me, or why it is that for some reason I feel so right about all of this in spite of some of the seemingly way out there concepts involved? I do not. I only know that I will do whatever I have to do to maintain this wonderful equilibrium I have attained, this consolidation of self that is affording me so much that I had no idea I was missing. To go back to the way I was is all but impossible, and absurd on the face of it. I would rather pull out my fingernails with a plumber's wrench. That’s how significant and life altering this experience has been for me.

Is there a lesson here? Do I think everyone should rush out and put on their version of a dress rather than spend years of their life in therapy? Who knows? And yet, if you are confused about your identity, gender or otherwise, and or have some feeling or whatever hidden inside of you that won’t let you be up in spite of your attempts to deny its legitimacy, or even its existence, what have you got to lose? You can always say you are involved in a therapeutic experiment and stop, if need be, anytime you want. Question is: when all is said and done, will you really want to?

nanci blu