We lay together

We lay together my arms wrapped around you until daylight; you sleeping, my hands cupping your breasts, you holding them there where you had drawn them, your breath coming in soft almost snores. Me, half asleep, drifting twixt dreams and the warmth of you. Your skin set fires burning in me where we touched, fires which glowed charcoal bright with your being, fires which glowed deep into my sleep, deep into my half waking, deep into the first light that showed faintly around the shutters; deep inside me, warming to the centre of my being, so I was not me, but me and you and us all in the same boundaryless glow of warmth. A warmth of being, of man and humankind, and woman crooked in the bend of my body and my double wanting of you - sweet agony that was such bliss of the us-ness that I would have not have cared if we had hung for ever just on the cusp of the moment between sleep and love-making and the cries of our coming and the soft drifts of setting aftermath awash with the echoes of our still pulsing union. To make love, to half sleep, to almost dream, to lie tight wrapped one with the other, to be suspended both in the now of half conscious half dream sleep drift silk oblivion of night, and yet not any but all of these in the same slow pulsing moments. Here, not here, you, I, we, us, sleep, love, burning flesh touch, desires - dreams dark envelope fading into light; drift of no time in each whispered breath suspended in one package of double being - you and I and us and sleep and not sleep and dark and coming light and the love that we did not make, but made so deeply in being boundaryless, suspended in that no-man’s no-woman’s land of neither sleep nor wake.

So why?

So why? Why the naming of what I am? Why the “coming out”? 

 

So much easier to keep your head down and pretend; pretend what you have been encouraged to pretend, to perpetuate the myth, to pretend that it is just not so! After all, it made other people comfortable with their version of reality to pretend a complete normality; a version that did not contain such inconveniences as having to accept someone as being different. 

 

If I really reach down inside, the answer must lie in part in wanting some self-respect - to be known as who and what I am - and in part in wanting others caught in this in-between world to know that they are not alone. That it is the prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance of other's that is the problem, not what we are, as we are born, as we are made. That is not something we can be held responsible for. It is not something we have chosen. It is not something we do, it is simply as we are.

I am happy to be held to account for my actions. I am not happy to be held to account for the way nature made my body.

It is bad enough facing all of that prejudice without facing your own inward doubts and worse, the shame that you may come to feel because of it. That really does poison, the shame, it is quite toxic. It makes you not want to be you; but none of us, none one of us, have the choice of not being what we are. In the end you do have to come to terms with that, to accept, to be what you are. 

 

Note – I do say, “What you are” not “What you have become”. This is not about accepting what you have become because of your actions. It is not like standing up as saying “I am D and I am an alcoholic” as a step to changing to not being one any longer. This is simply about your biology, about that which is you right to your core. 

 

So, what is it that I am? Simple. I am a chimera.

First, take two foetuses in the very earliest stages of conception, twins, but when they are no more than the smallest bundle of cells. Then allow them to come into contact with each other. Something strange can happen to those two bundles of what are as yet stem cells – so adaptable and changeable at that stage – so able to become anything – they become entangled, they merge into one being. But one being with two distinct cell lines made from what were, for a time, two separate lives.

It may be that they are both males. It may be that they are both females. Chances are, if that is the case, they will pass through life never knowing that they are a twin being. But what if one is male and the other female? Think – as they grow, as they weave one in and out of the other, so some parts of the body will want to become male, others female. Some cells have the chromosomes that will carry male genes, Y chromosomes. Some cells will not. When that critical time comes when “maleness” is switched on – about 12 weeks – those cells, those with the Y, can respond to the call, can become “man” cells, can set out to build a boy. But the other cells, those that are XX cells, they are deaf to that signal. They carry on doing what they are programmed to do. They set out to build a girl. 

 

The result? A body that is both. A dual purpose, dual function body - well, sort of, at least in terms of structures. That is where the hormones come in. If there are enough XY cells then there may be just enough hormone produced to make them dominant, so the result is apparently male. It may even be functionally male. It may even grow up believing that it is male. It may even look like one - well, reasonably so. It may grow like one. Yes, it may even passes through puberty at the right time and become what appears to be a man. It may even function as a man – biologically.

So far so good. But – ah the “BUT” had to come. Those girl cells, those XX cells, they had not been idle. They had followed their instructions and build all the right bits to make a female, and even wired them up in the right way, only the hormones kept them quite about it. Too much testosterone – or androgen as it is sometimes called – not sure what the difference is if any, not that it matters – and too little oestrogen. Poor girl cells. Not triggered into full action. Not allowed to blossom. But what they have built, what they have become, is still there, is still alive and responsive.

What have we got? A heterosexual male who is also a female. Bazaar? Exotic? Confused and confusing? Try living it!

The pas de deux of shame

Shame is a destructive force, especially when it is re-enforced by someone you love, even more if they are your life partner. If you are uncomfortable and disconcerted by what you are, uncertain about what it makes you, fearful of how others may react, you are made vulnerable. It makes you doubt yourself. It erodes your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

If your partner's reaction is to be ashamed about that within you which they find difficulty in accepting, then they are caught in a double bind: they love you, but they do not love what you are. They want to have the one without having the other, but it cannot be like that. They will not face or embrace what it is they find distasteful within you, but you need it to be faced and embraced, very much need that to be so, to help overcome your own fears because of it - to know that you can be loved as you are. They love you, but reject that in you which they feel is shameful. Because you love them and value their opinion of you, you take on that shame that they feel and it drives you further into a more permanent and damaging shame. Such a poisonous dance for two.

But what if that which is being denied is what your core being is? What if it is about how you were born, how you are made?

Imagine being biologically both male and female in the same body, the one hidden within the other, but no-the-less there, very much there. Now imagine your life partner denies the existence of this and makes any reference to it, any illusion, any sign or mention completely and utterly taboo. Think how that might drive you into feeling shunned. Making you feel that so much as the least mention and you will be completely and totally rejected as an abhorrent object of unmitigated shame.

They have found some form of accommodation with it by exporting their difficulties, by denying that it is there. This puts the onus on you join their game of pretending that it does not exist - or facing being shunned.

That is the pas de deux of shame.