The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [109]
KENNARD: If you appeal to people’s humanity, especially women, they’re usually okay. I just said, “It’s really hard for me. I feel like a freak. I don’t want to be here.” But it didn’t work with her. It was like I had gone over to the enemy or something. It’s like I was saying before: younger people are much better about it than lesbian women my age.
Q: Would you mind if we talked a little about your relationship and how you got together and the challenges of being in a relationship with a person who is transitioning?
MARIANNE: One thing that was helpful was that Tom wasn’t the first trans person that I knew. I was friends with other transpeople and their partners. Some of my friends have been in a situation where they came to know their partner as one gender, as one identity, and then in the context of their relationship that changed, and so they had to make that transition, to give up that identity that they had shared as a couple and transition into a new one. And that is a journey that I really respect. But Tom was already transitioning, and that definitely was an advantage for us as a couple.
I think that part of transition, no matter what kind of transition, is that it is a selfish process. Speaking as a person who was a sighted person and now I’m losing it and having to learn to be in the world in a whole different way, to me that’s a selfish process. It’s pretty much all I can do sometimes to deal with that. And it’s hard to have something so absorbing in your life, and be a couple. And at the time that Tom was having his transition about gender, I was having a transition about becoming a middle-aged woman, losing my vision, and my children growing up and leaving home. And then Tom had lived in a relationship but in his own space, alone, for a long time. So then there was another transition as we started spending a lot of time mostly here. He had this whole apartment to himself. So some of those things are unique to a couple that has a transgender person in it, and definitely there is a part of this process that I can’t enter. It’s a personal process. I can be feeling fine about his body, that I like his body, even as it changes, but he could be having different feelings at different times about his body. And that’s not about me, but it has an effect on me.
Q: Have you noticed any significant changes in Tom after transition?”
I wasn’t in a relationship with Tom before, so I don’t know what his communication style was. But we have a really different style of communication, in that mine tended to include more words than his does. And compounded by the problem of losing my vision, I need more words, and talking in a way more than some people might. I also think there is also the whole thing of what Tom refers to as a kind of adolescence. And a lot of guys talk about it that way. It’s very confusing to be in a relationship with someone who is on the one hand six or seven years older than you are, and has gray temples, but also has another adolescent part, trying to figure out things like how to be a man. It is this process you have to go through. Then there’s this whole phenomenon that Tom mentioned of having to talk about it [transition], in a lot of detail. I think it’s really interesting. So there is a way that I really like talking about it, but I also like that more time has passed and he’s had more experience, that if we go into a social situation, there is a range of topics, not just that one.
I think that’s a struggle that I’ve heard from other partners, friends, and allies close to people in transition. It’s really key that you maintain a boundary, and that you continue to put energy into yourself. You have to hold your own place, and that seems especially important and also difficult to get that balance. And then the other thing is when Tom was really early in transition, we didn’t have the kind of ease that we have now. Because his body had