Friday - The Mothers : (The Mother Aspect of the Goddess).

Some extracts from this chapter on parenting.

My parenting was always full of seeming contradictions. I was a female father, whom my children knew only as a woman, although I had created the seed that fathered them. This made life very difficult but I know that if I had transitioned earlier or not met Jackie, I may never have had children - nor had the delight of watching two wonderful girls grow and of sharing much with them. It was them that made me a parent. They helped forge me - sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with real pain. They taught me about the reality of being part of life's cycle. This book is dedicated to them.

As they grew up I saw how differently they treated males - and knew that they had missed the fun and benefit of having a parent who was a father in their lives. I know what I would have liked to have in my life. A Dad I could have related to as a girl. A Dad that as a girl I could have had fun with. A Dad I could have experimented with as the safe male in my life. If I wanted this, then how much did my daughters want the same?

I could only offer them something different, someone different - a parent born between the tides, a person nonetheless that loved them deeply. We were for them two parents that loved each other and them.

Jackie and I were often very happy to be together, despite all the pain that we had experienced. She was often inspiring. I think we both gave each other much.. This chapter is the story of how we tried to keep our promise to each other and to our children to share with them all that we could...and to leave them free to grow.

When we returned from Australia to England in 1976, we were tired but we still shared the old ideals that had brought us together. We had only got this far because we deeply loved each other and saw what we shared as very precious. We were determined to preserve our family, to continue to live together. We also remained physically close despite all the changes in me. We remained lovers, both of us finding other ways to give each other pleasure. I have since slept with other women as well as having normal heterosexual relationships with men and know myself as bisexual - but I think Jackie was only bisexual in the context of our relationship.

For what Jackie was giving me, for enabling me to stay parenting with our children with her, I both loved her and put her on a pedestal as my father did my mother, for, beyond thinking of Jackie a wonderfully gifted and generous person, I was enormously grateful for her agreement that we could bring up the children together. I idealised her and could not see her realistically. It took years before I learnt of how she had both loved and hated me. Loved me for what I gave, hated me for trapping her in a life that she had not planned.

There were other aspects to our relationship that I did not see as clearly as I did later. I did not realise that our family relationship also helped to trap me in role behaviour which were not completely natural for me but formed both by Jackie's expectations and by our cultural expectations for fathers. I thus did the things for the family that was expected culturally of a father.

The basic human attributes of masculine and feminine are naturally and usually connected to the reproductive functions of the genders. Males are predestined to usually want to be fathers, females to be mothers. We enjoy being gendered. These differences are grounded across cultures and history because they are based on the usual association of a certain set of genitals with real brain and/or spirit differences. Our male-female bi-polar society is thus natural and not bound to the varying cultural expressions of gender.

But this linkage of genitals to gender is not as basic as the link between our brain or spirit with gender. A gift that transsexuals give society is breaking the link between the configuration of the reproductive organs and our parental roles. Other factors in reproductive science are leading the same way. Today fathers need not physically father. Mothers need not physically bear their children. Today parenting roles and titles should be re-rooted, linked to the heart of the individual and be born out of a relationship with children. Transsexuals have a symbolic value. They can stand for the power of individuals to define their lives, to value spirit over genitals - although like others, they too enjoy being gendered - being gendered in the gender of their spirits.

Gender also does not determine sexual partners. This is a wholly other matter. The flexibility that really exists in this was experienced by Jackie and I. We continued after my transition to enjoy going to bed together. - at least on many occasions.

...At that time the only place in England that was willing to surgically reassign transsexuals was Charing Cross Hospital in London. The procedure there was that I should once a month see a certain elderly and eccentric psychologist, a Doctor John Randel, for half an hour. If after a year he felt that I was succeeding in living as a woman, he would recommend me surgery.

These sessions were always shallow and somewhat strange but fortunately I was not going to him for help in untangling myself. They were simply for him to vet me. The first such meeting in February 1977 was what my diary called: "a terrible grilling, deliberately provocative". I think the idea was that if I continued to see him despite this, I would be demonstrating that my "condition" was not superficial. However I felt his criteria were superficial. I felt that to prove myself "female" during my visits to him I would have always on "my most careful and ladylike behaviour" in a most old fashioned way.

In a sense, I was fulfilling the expected "patient's" dance for I continued to want access to the mysteriously alchemic hormone pills. If I were to be prescribed these, then I was expected after a year or two to proceed to surgery. The latter was never as big a deal for me as were hormones. The female hormone balance in my body, the changes that this had enabled in my body, my everyday life as a woman, were vastly more important to me than surgery. ...

Surgery would make my life far safer. I lived with the fear that if I were arrested, I could be thrown into a male prison and raped. For me it was a real risk given the political nature of my work. I thought those who framed these rules gave to surgery much too much weight. They were unaware that the hormone balance was the key element together with the birth gendered brain. Surgery should not be required before giving legal recognistion to a change of gender roles.

Of course surgery would presumably allow me to have intercourse as a woman. This was still an unknown sexual territory for me that was somewhat fearful and desired. But while I was living with Jackie it was scarcely a problem. It was a potential problem for I knew I was bisexual. But when I first sought surgery I did not have a regular partner who wanted me to be capable of intercourse.

........But then something else happened that was awful and devastating. Something unimaginable. A letter came from Jackie, written before she knew of what had happened with my father, saying she thought I should not follow her and the children to Australia. She said it gently. She said she did not want to drag me to Australia, that my talents for international work would be wasted in Australia.

But her gentleness did not disguise for a moment the bite of what she said. She had decided to break the relationship between us. I suddenly realised that my view of the back of our children walking away down the airport corridor might be the last that I saw of them for many years. Effectively, without my consent, without even discussing the possibility, Jackie, the woman that I loved, my equal legal partner in caring for the children, had practically abducted them to Australia.

A great cry of anguish went up from me. I was nearly out of my mind. I had presumed that we would be soon united. I found the idea that I might well have seen Karina and Katie and Jackie for the last time unimaginably horrific. I wondered how pre-planned this had been. . I howled in disbelieve. I wept and cried. I can remember driving out of London, driving through the woods and trees that I loved, crying. Great for my figure. I lost a stone and a half in seven weeks. It took me weeks to get over the initial shock. I cried and cried (hiding all this from Mum - I did not want her involvement given how much Jackie feared her).

I wrote Jackie a desperate letter. Not reproving her but telling her that my international work was of tiny importance to me compared with caring for our children... something that I knew she well knew.

I told her too that I loved her - but that if she needed an independent life I would respect this. She and I could live apart - but I begged, please don't put up a barrier that would keep me from our children. I reminded her that I couldn't stay in England because I would lose my residency rights in Australia. I told her too about my father. Letters to and from Australia are cruel. I had to wait two weeks for the response.

When her response came, she was begging for forgiveness - and telling me to come. She said she had not realised quite how devastating her plan would be for me. Yes, I was welcome to come back to Australia. Of course I could see the children and be with them. They needed me.

I very happily took her letter at its face value. I would go back to Australia. But I knew in my stomach that my relationship with Jackie would never be the same. The element of trust was undermined. I knew that she had not made this decision lightly. She must have been hiding much from me. Still I knew there was truth in what she said. I knew that she did feel guilty about taking me from my work as she had some three years earlier. She did not want to damage my work again.

But I also knew, felt again in my gut, that if it had been that simple, she would have told me to my face. I knew but did not want to know, that she had not told me of her plan for two further still unspoken reasons. One was that her plans were illegal. I had rights as a parent - and the children had legal rights to have me as a caring parent. But parenting for me was something quite apart from human laws. I would not use the law - and Jackie knew this. The other reason, and a more realistic reason, was that she knew that, if she told me to my face, she would not be able to persuade me to abandon my role in looking after our children.

I now knew that once more my gift with words had persuaded her to have me back - as it had when I had originally wooed her by letter to Australia to marry me. I did not like this - but she had invited me to return and I was enormously grateful. So I packed up our belongings in 13 tea chests and send them off - nearly sending off my passport too. I recover this at the last moment from the warehouse. If I had lost this, I might well have not been able to return in time to retain my residence rights in Australia.

... It was 7 years since I transitioned. My eldest daughter was now ten, my youngest 9.

By a remarkable "co-incidence" my operation was scheduled by the hospital for May 1st 1981, the Beltaine festival when my pagan ancestors in Britain and Ireland celebrated life, fresh green spring growth and sexuality - and my Christian medieval ancestors have celebrated much the same with maypole dances. I now think this was a most highly appropriate day to come into the full use of my own sexuality.

By now I was utterly relaxed about having the operation. I felt it was hardly sex or gender changing for my brain and other aspects of me had been female since birth. Also by now, because I had been taking female hormones for so many years, my external male organs are now childlike, marked with a dark line along the natural line that my vulva would form and sexually useless.

Immediately before the operation, I made a quick trip to the male toilet and I gave my penis one final exercise, seeing how high up the wall I could piss in a final irreverent farewell salute to the male world! I have written a poem about this.

____________________________________________________

THE STORY OF THE UNWANTED PENIS

Now there is a clear divine need to sing a song to my penis

Before it gives its life that I might better live.

It too is part of the divine creation

Would I need in another culture to part from it?

But for me, it's transformation

was a magic that I welcomed.

I will sing of the 4.75 inch individual who lived in my groin.

Well, that was his size on average.

For he had a habit of growing and shrinking.

Now it was perhaps unfortunate for him

that he found himself living with a female spirit.

But did that make him a failure, a mistake?

Some similarly minded transgendered friends

reckon he was a disaster, an illness, a cancer,

the better cut off the better.

But that is not fair to him

There is nothing else like a penis in human kind.

He has a mind of his own.

He will strut up and down as he pleases.

Most males reckon that he is something special.

They celebrate his presence with high ritual.

So they should. He deserves an accolade.

But females know that he is not whole

until he is contained within them.

They know his weaknesses .

They know he often lacks stamina

and must be conserved

until the time comes for the grand climax.

The Last Rite I gave him

was to go to the bathroom

just before the operation

so he could spray as high as he could

up the urinal wall.

It was a salute like that given by fire boats to ocean liners

Thus my penis welcomed the birth of my more female body.

It sacrificed its sensitive skin to give me a vagina.

Its glans became my clit.

I am grateful to it and honour it.

I wanted to be utterly at home with my reformed body. I wanted to get rid of the "no-go" territory with my male lovers, to be utterly at home with my reformed body, testing it, enjoying it. I wondered just how it would be at last able to be able to fully relax and enjoy every bit of my body - and to have full sexual intercourse. I had been warned that this was a serious operation that could go wrong but when I took the pre-op drug that would make me unconscious I was not just relaxed but also excited.

I had been approved for this operation by a medical team based at Monash University. It had subjected me to supervision by a psychotherapist, by a psychologist and by the Professor Williams who headed the team, for a year to see how I get on living as a woman - despite my having already spent six years doing just this before I first met with them. Effectively I had to be their "certified" woman!

It was an odd kind of psychotherapy for people like myself. I came to this clinic as did many others because we had self-diagnosed ourselves beforehand and chosen our own treatment. The year of waiting was to make sure we had made the right decision. This meant that the members of the medical team were not providing so much therapy as being examiners. This was a great shame. It deprived us of therapy that we might really have appreciated. We often found we could not confess any doubts without endangering our own treatment. Yet any intelligent person going through this process, no matter how firm the decision to enter this process, would also be constantly questioning themselves.

To give a personal example: I had lived so successfully as a woman for so long that I sometimes questioned my need to subject myself to a somewhat risky operation. I mentioned this to my psychotherapist on just one occasion. She immediately questioned her own assessment of me as a transsexual and decided I must be sent to yet another psychotherapist for another confirmatory assessment. My frankness had put into some danger my approval for the operation - and seemingly their view of my femininity. That was the last time I mentioned any doubts. This was a great disappointment for me. I would have enjoyed having the luxury of a proper relationship with my psychotherapist in which I could relax, be open, without fearing being judged.

....

I did not see this operation as making me a woman. The Castrati singers that were the glory of Italian Catholic church choirs up until the 19th Century saw themselves as male. I knew that I was a woman beforehand and had been since birth. Surgery does not give one a gender. It is plain daft that this operation is seen as a necessity in the laws of many counties before a person is allowed to re-adjust a wrong gender assignment at birth. I fear that some of today's male surgeons may get a sexual kick out of creating beautiful women - and may reject those candidates who would not make pretty women. I suspect there is a very high rate of suicides among those rejected.

As for me, this is my opinion.:

I am not female because a doctor certified me so

I am not female because a doctor made me so

I am not female because I am castrated

I am not female because I am conditioned

I am not female because I am attractive to men

I am not female because I am able to give birth

I am not female because I bleed monthly

I am not female because my clitoris is less than 0.7cms long

I am not female because I have breasts.

There are many women that break one or more of these criteria - and are still women. No, being female is something utterly deeper, something ultimately deep in our creation as individuals when we were within the safe sanctuaries of our mother's wombs. It is here that we are given our gendered wired brain, here that the true foundations are laid of our richly gendered lives.

One thing that the operaion did make possible was vaginal sex. I could now in theory make love freely, spontaneously, simply and gloriously, without having first to make a deeply personal speech or explanation.

And within two weeks of the operation, a diamond prospector was in my bed! He had originally come to see me soon after I came home because he knew I had been researching the vast diamond secrets of the Australian outback. He then became fascinated with me. A few days later he turned up with two large steaks and a bottle of wine. I was amazed. Jackie had to instruct me that an old fashioned Australian male custom was not simply to bring alcohol but also meat. Within days, although still sore, we were together. It was a purely sexual fling and nothing to do with love. But I thanked the Gods for sending me so quickly a lover that could help consecrate, integrate, my reshaped body. I was in pain but exultant.

However having a lover was difficult for me when Jackie and I were living together even thou' she had frequently told me she wanted me to have other lovers as she had enjoyed in London. I nevertheless did not feel free within our family home. I needed some privacy . Our house was very small so I suggested to Jackie that I rent a house a few doors away to give us effectively more space. I was then amazed and astonished when Jackie greeted this idea by launching a blistering attack on me. She asked how could I dare to even think of moving out when she had been doing so much to support me through my operation? She accused me of wanting to desert her and the children.. She had been amazingly good at looking after me when I came home from the hospital. I had no wish to make her feel rejected. I loved her - and my priority was still maintaining a relationship that allowed us to completely share our caring for the children

So once again my efforts to secure a little more independence collapsed. It turned out to be only a fleeting affaire with Graham so soon Jackie and I were back to living together an the manner that now seemed to be the pattern of our lives. But Jackie was preparing to be sexually freer. In the January of next year, 1982, she had her tubes tied.

As for my first experience of vaginal sex with men. Well there had been a certain wildness in it - a joy in being ploughed. But I had physically hurt. My vagina was small and raw. I wondered at the cruel fate that had created Aids to bring to an end with the 1960s age of sexual freedom on the pill before I could enjoy it. If I had been free earlier, I thought I would have enjoyed sex as much as any infertile woman could.

But when Jackie and I made love, there was much more gentleness, much more of tuning in to each other, much more of the shuddering delight of bringing each other slowly on to orgasm. Humans that are bisexual perhaps are the most fortunate. Maybe if conditioning did not have its play, many more would be bisexual. A wise Australian friend of mine once said regarding the gender of her partners that she fell in love and then noted the gender of her partner.

There is a male myth that their "balls" give men their courage and drive their creativity. For me the operation was no hindrance to energy or creativity. It rather unleashed it. In August I had my first article published as a journalist. It ran over three pages in a Saturday broadsheet and was nationally syndicated throughout Australia and advertised on television.

.........

No We live in a society that presumes gender roles depend on genitals. In such a rigid system I have no place. I did not sleep with a man to create our children. In such a rigid system - what relationship do I have with grandchildren? What relationship do daughters tell sons they have to me?

In other times and places the social system is more open and flexible. In such societies there are places for grandparents, god-mothers, aunts, magical aunts, spinners of good night stories - second mothers, second lovers, - for a wealth of relationships spun out of the depths of the human heart that reflect all the magic of the many kinds of humans that exist.

I think in such a society the children know who you are - and are happy with you if you truly love and care for them. They need no theory. You can tell them they have a second mother - they can accept it and are happy - as I found with our children The trouble only comes when they find the world outside the family is far more judgmental, narrow and rigid.

Women and men do not only create with wombs and seed. This is the least way. We are in our essence a whirling storm of creation, with every particle of our bodies constantly changing, coming and leaving. We create as do the deities, with the womb of our imagination. The work of creation is never done and we also share in God's creating. God's normal posture is on the birthing chair or bed according to the mystic Meister Ekhard.

After this trauma I went in August 1991 to immerse myself in the wild and to seek some healing from wild sacred places with a good friend, Hannah. We travelled through the Barmah Forest on the River Murray that is revered still by Aborigines. This is a great forest of eucalyptus that were standing in flood waters with moss splattered rocks and grey shimmering bark. I made fire Aboriginal style despite the constant rain by using the dry underbark.

From here we went deep into the mulga desert with its weeping slender trees, the stiff salt bush and willowy peppercorn trees to the ancient wind plastered sand dunes of Lake Mungo where once communities of Neandethral and Homo Sapiens humans lived side by side - two races that I believe inter- breed helping to create the Aborigines and us. Here I watched caterpillars taking advantage of the constant winds to roll themselves across the sands. There were eagles, kangaroos - and dreams.

I dreamt that I was with Jackie and another younger but adult person that was probably Katie but could have been Karina. We went to Roger's home in London where my daughter was assigned a first floor front room. I was assigned the back room of Roger's brother Peter. It was in its usual state with pictures stuck on walls and talc upon the floor. Jackie went upstairs to the room she has been assigned.. I am jealous, picturing her in a bedroom with en suite bathroom. But I overcome my jealousy and accepted my room .

I then went up the stairs to find Jackie only to find she has been taken unexpectedly through a new corridor into the house next door to find her room. I set off after her - but could not find her. I then woke up and watched with Hannah a spectacular dawn over the desert.

After this I walked from our camp, through seemingly endless glades - like a park that goes on for ever that enticed me to walk deeper and deeper into it, a trance inducing place that could kill me with my ignorance of the knowledge needed to survive in her. I flet that if I walked too far the desert forest would swallow our camp making it impossible for me to ever find it again.. The plains I crossed turned out not to be of grass but of fine rounded leafed plants, thinly layered on clay pan, in glade after glade - all the product of recent rain. When I found fresh kangaroo paw marks, I tracked them, head down - then was startled to find I had walked into a herd of equally startled kangaroos. I felt strangely at home in this wilderness despite my lack of knowledge. Here were the spirits that I was coming to know.

In my second remembered dream in the bush, I was with my brother Tony on the roof of a double decker London bus taking him to college. The bus then stopped. I then realised that by mistake we hadn't got on the bus that Katie or Karina had told me to take. I fumbled the change, dropping coins on the roof before being helped down. When we reach the college that we seemed to be heading for, Tony leaves, leaving me stranded. He did not need me. I felt helpless. My interpretation of this was that my family was to be other people, not members of my blood family. I was stumbling over the old names but ready to meet new people.

........

Such wonders and such dreams helped assuage the pain of separation. Soon after this my film demanded my attention and once more I have to leave Australia, leaving behind me much pain, not just my own pain, but what seeed to be the vivid raw pain of three women that I much loved, Karina, Katie and of Jackie. However much I wanted to remove their pain or loved them, I knew that it was not mine to remove. They had told me they must do it themselves. I could simply hope and pray that they would succeed in working out their pain.

I had no choice but to continue on my path. It seemed I was now being freed of old bonds..

This is my story of our family - apart from a little more that I will tell in the next chapter. There are of course other aspects. Jackie has her own song, her own path to follow. Despite the pain of learning how she saw me and how hard she found her path, I remember all the beauty that we shared and what I learnt from her. For the splendours of what we shared I owe her and our children gratitude. Katie and I am still good friends - and perhaps by the time you come to read this book, Karina and I will be together again. I hope this is so.

My children of course also have their own stories. I cannot tell what it was like to have such a parent as myself. That is for them to tell if they so chose. I hope they remember I loved them much, but I know it was not easy for them.

END