Out of the Second Closet

by Julia Cybele Lansberry

Gail Sheehy's depiction of life "passages" applies equally well to transsexuals. After an emotionally intense year or three of trial and transition, many of us pass through a phase of wanting to distance ourselves from our former community of sister-travellers. We've had the all-important surgery. After all, we're fully women now, and it often feels that we have little in common anymore with those supplicants at the threshold, still aspiring to enter the gates of paradise. And besides, they are uncomfortable with us too, whispering about post-op elitism and making us feel unwelcome and unwanted in the old support groups. Gone are the bonds of common spirit and common heart, once so evident. In fact, we're so very much adjusted that our past is something now to be hidden away with a touch of shame. Perhaps that shame is tinged with a slightly familiar feeling and all the more uncomfortable as we rearrange life and friendships in order to more perfectly play the social role of ordinary women. Sometimes there's a lot of depression and loneliness, too, and more than a little puzzlement over still unanswered questions of who are we, really? Consider the possibility that it might be a valuable experience to reconnect once in a while with sisters in transition. Why? Well, one reason I recall is that no one was there for me in that stage of life's journey. I had to seek out the few good biographies, hoping that such personal stories were told with reasonable honesty... that the rough places were not totally confabulated or edited out of the text. And sometimes they obviously were. An acquaintance from work gave me a book, Anne Bolin's In Search of Eve. This contained a lot of potentially life-saving information and objective observations, vitally important to me back in '91 - '92. The author is an anthropologist, therefore not confined to the usual clinical perspective of the helping professional. At long last, I did find opportunity for extended conversation with a post-op TS woman! She was my roommate at Mt. San Rafael Hospital, an institution familiar to some of you (laugh)! Her post-op status offered only three days seniority, but she clearly did have the time to talk with me about it! Yes, I know that the support groups and questions and others' confused searching do become burdensome after a time! For your own sake, and for others, and for nurturing the best within you, please consider not dissimulating, not hiding your unique nature. Without lapsing into excess, once in a while be "out there", in some small way leaving open a doorway to your personal, unique knowledge of the mystery of what is human in all of us. Once in a while, celebrate who you are, who you have been ... for you; we, are the substance of myth made flesh. In you; in me, are answers which have power to transform the human condition, because we ourselves have passed through such fires of transformation. Such light ought not to be hidden in the confinement of closets, be they old ones or new.