Henry Declan - Trans Voices

TRANS VOICES

Becoming Who You Are

Declan Henry

Foreword by Professor Stephen Whittle, OBE

Afterword by Jane Fae

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

Contents

Interviewees

I interviewed several dozen trans people for this book. Many wished to be anonymous so their names and some other details have been changed.

Foreword

Professor Stephen Whittle, OBE

Press for Change, UK

Before starting this incredibly useful and often astonishing book by Declan Henry, I suggest you do the following (very small) exercise. Even if you have read Radclyffe Halls lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness , but know little of the history surrounding it, just look it up on Wikipedia. Acquaint yourself with some of the furore that surrounded this rather worthy and somewhat dull book and the massively publicised 1928 obscenity trial which led to a ban on its publication or sale in Britain, for more than 20 years.

I was 15 when I managed to get hold of a copy of Halls novel. I hoped it might carry some of the intensely erotic sexual desire described in D. H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover . Lawrences book had been the subject of an obscenity trial in 1960, but found by a jury to be unlikely to deprave the reader, despite its descriptions of sexual intercourse and many expletives such as f**k and c**t. Like so many teenagers, I had managed to read the well-thumbed copy of Lawrences soap opera of Edwardian desire that had been passed around at school.

Disappointingly, there were no hot fumblings in the potting shed in The Well of Loneliness . Nowhere in Halls story of her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, and his (her) quest for a lover and lifelong relationship, can we find anything that might be described as stimulating or suggestive. If you have read it, you will know the novel contains nothing which might raise your pulse rate, never mind set your loins aflame. The nearest inkling of any sexual activity between Stephen Gordon and Marym, the woman he loves, is in the one phrase:

and that night, they were not divided.

That insinuates that they could have been up all night having a good gossip or a midnight feast, whilst playing canasta, which was the sort of thing my girlfriends and I did at Girl Guide camp.

I had hoped that Halls thinly disguised semi-autobiographical account of hir love for a woman note my careful use of the word hir instead of her would reflect something of my teenage angst. Stephen Gordon was a wo/man who loved and desired a woman. Being madly in love myself with a girl at one of Manchesters best all-girls schools, I hoped the novel would explain how and what I was meant to do with that love. I already knew it was a forbidden love; in 1970, for me, it was still a love without a name.

Comprehending Halls novel was painful it is very worthy, and written in a romanticised pastiche of Shakespeares 16th century English and very distressing. In a moment of clarity I realised I wasnt going to grow up to be a lesbian. Stephen Gordons feelings were unmistakably descriptions of my own. This was a fictional account of my own sense of self-hood, and yet, despite the authors insistence at the obscenity trial that this was a book about lesbian love, it was to me, at least not an account of a woman in love. To read The Well of Loneliness was to study the despair of a man who everyone else could only see as a woman. It was another breach in the dyke (pardon the pun). I came to realise that I had no choice but to try and find a way of getting the impossible, a sex change or not to live at all.

At the obscenity trial, the judge decided that any literary merit of Halls novel was irrelevant and what mattered was that: No reasonable person could say that a plea for the recognition and toleration of inverts was not obscene .

By inverts the judge was clearly referring to us all: lesbian women, gay men and trans people; we were all lumped together because in 1928, the law, medicine and society had no doubt we were all the same.

Until the early 1970s, gay men, lesbian women and trans people found themselves locked in a set of assumption traps. The dominant assumption of heteronormativity as regards sexual orientation was that anyone born female who wished to dress in a masculine way, would only wish to do so in order to seduce another person born female, and anyone born male who wished to dress in a feminine way, would only wish to do so to be seduced by another person born male. As the judge said of Stephen Gordon, effectively Hall herself, in the Wells obscenity trial, L, G, B or T, we were all equally as disturbed and perverted, and, as inverts, not worthy of any form of defence.

Ever since the early medieval period, the law had not distinguished between people who loved members of their own sex group, and those who wanted to change sex groups and love someone of the (now) opposite sex. Until really quite recently, the criminalisation and persecution of gay men and lesbian women meant that those who could hide their sexuality would do so. But, for those who were trans, it was a much more difficult task. It was more than hiding your sexuality, it actually meant hiding your core self, the very person you are.

Until the mid-1930s, separation and analysis of the chemistry of sex hormones in the lab and the later scientific capabilities to replicate and manufacture them, to change sex was not only unattainable, but madness. In psychiatry, it was the same type of madness that makes people think they are Napoleon or Jesus, and therefore, some believe they are a man (or woman) in opposition to their birth and developed body. The same logic that made trans people the same sort of invert as those who were gay or lesbian, would therefore label many gay men and lesbian women as being as mad as those misguided souls who wanted to change their sex.

I explain this partly because it shares a little about myself, but also because it describes just one of the many crossroads along the paths which lesbian, gay and trans people have travelled. Look closely and you will see that the paths have always been just that little bit separate and different yet, throughout our communities histories, they have always been very much connected. Like tracing a Celtic knot, when studying L, G, B or T history, one can never be certain of which track one is following. You may cross over your own pathway, or that of another, or the paths may run alongside each other for a while, then criss-cross under the others path, before apparently rejoining as you turn a corner. Along these pathways we have often held hands whilst travelling together in joint battles for equality, for liberty, for the right to be, for the right to love and for the right to be loved. These are the roads along which our community histories have been written, and the crossroads along the way have been the points at which we have been engaged together in our battles with the law.

People who are lesbian, gay, bi or trans have a great deal in common, not least our joint history of persecution, and yet many gay men and lesbian women still do not understand what it means to be trans. As trans people, whoever we love, or sleep with, our complex bodies complicate our sexualities. As a trans man, if I love a man there will be those who ask why I want to change my gender, and they clearly dont get it when I answer, Whats my gender identity got to do with the gender of the person I love?

Likewise, as a trans man, if I love a woman, then the same people would say that I must be a butch lesbian, who cannot live with the shame of my perverse sexual orientation. And again they dont get it when I say, What has the gender identity of the person I love got to do with my gender? Either way, my sexuality or sexual orientation is never legitimate, so we do understand what it is like to be lesbian or gay, because, even with gender reassignment treatments and surgeries, our bodies will never lose the traces of our past, and our ways of being will never lose the traces of our upbringing and socialisation.