Book Review

Reviewed by Niko Lekay

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

What this book offers is stories that may be close to what you want to hear, but it also forces you to understand how richly varied people are.

Finding The Real Me

True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity

by Tracie O'Keefe & Katrina Fox
Published by Jossey-Bass, April 2003
I.S.B.N. 0787965472

I read this book for a reason, to help me understand, so I can help my friend and his/her family. To understand how older transwomen, playing the role of a male bastion of society, experience and manage their self-discovery and the presentation of their sex and gender. I raced through the book, jotting down the notes that rang bells.

The layout of the book is unstructured, reflecting the nature of diversity, so that stories of male-to-female, female-to-male, and androgyny are interspersed with stories of older and younger people, complete and incomplete transitions. Had the editors structured the book into sections, I would have read only what I wanted to, and would have missed the rest. What this book offers is stories that may be close to what you want to hear, but it also forces you to understand how richly varied people are.

A book like this one saves you from feeling that you are alone. But while there is comfort to be found in stories that resonate with your own experience, there is the additional possibility of discovering what you did not know. The "real desire that dare not speak its name" is where many of these stories begin. Rebecca writes "I struggled to understand myself because I did not have a language that adequately described me". The work of making sense out of language and ideas that contradict what we intuitively know is hard enough, but so much harder when fear, secrecy and isolation are added to perplexity.

It is difficult to imagine, to those for whom sex and gender are taken for granted, like the ground we stand on, just what it is like to not have that. Many of the people writing for this collection call it a curse, and they are jealous of "normality". Rebecca says she was envious of girls her own age over their dress and appearance. She resorted to secretly trying on some of her sister's clothes, with the result that she became fascinated by signifiers of difference. In most of these stories, this fascination is not tolerated, and so begins a roller coaster ride of denial. Trying on clothes, hairstyles, ways of walking, being in secret. Coming close to declarations, or to being discovered, and so a flight back to the script that "normality" prescribes. It becomes a "typical purging pattern" that lasts for years, damages relationships and builds layers of guilt. A pattern that fiendishly asserts itself at the worst of times. As Rikki says, "when my life and relationships were not going well my desire to cross dress increased". To read so many voices saying the same thing might make it a bit easier to imagine and to understand.

In two of these stories I find sentences that marry perfectly. Christine Burns writes: "It wasn't the prospect of change that terrified me, but the consequences". Melanie McMullan puts it directly: "who will accept me as I am?"

Certainly the Internet is a godsend, as a way of finding acceptance, of developing self-understanding together with others, but it isn't enough. One of the nightmares is what will happen if abandonment of existing relations is not an option.

Jennifer explains that:, "my relationships to significant others are an integral part of my "authentic self" , but we [she and her long-term partner] have not found a model for maintaining these relationships while going through transition".

Those people who most need this book are those who are most uncertain, or their loved ones who are trying to understand. The stories of success, of looking back and measuring up the cost and saying it was worth it, are encouraging and give hope and confidence. But we also need to hear of doubt, of failures, and of the determination to keep trying to find a way that is responsive to our unique circumstances.

In a letter to Polare (June-July 2002) J**** writes: "I became fully aware ... of the distress my wife was going through ... Before I slept that night, I realised I could not carry on. I felt I had more to lose than I had to gain ... was I transsexual, or just on a mid-life escape trip?" Jennifer shows how she is still finding herself now, that even as she writes she is still making mistakes.

So she writes that even recently, "it was easier to tell myself and my partner that I was a cross-dresser than to admit the possibility that my core gender identity is feminine". Perhaps as a consequence of this uncertainty, her partner tends to see her gender expression as a "hobby" to be tolerated, to be kept in its place, but not encouraged.

There is much to learn from these stories - both for those engaged in finding themselves, their sex and gender, and for those close to them. Christine Burns puts it in a nutshell: "I had to learn to see the curse as a gift, and so I've set out to teach people what I see".

This is not a position based upon ideals, although it sounds like it. It is based, rather, on the gritty reality that to find the "real me", one doesn't have to be socially suicidal, that one has the right to privacy, that one may choose the time, the place and the company for coming out. And the last story impels us to return to the beginning as one realises this selection of life-cases is an ongoing transition, a re-entrant roller coaster pattern of dilemmas to solve.

Finding the Real Me does not attempt to present a series of stories showing methods of achieving "success" in transition. There is no simple way to find the "real me". Some people found the "real me" and went on from there. For others, it is never a matter of ridding the real self, but of creating it.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.