Ghost Dove

This is a cross-post with Daily Dead Bird

I saw a bird carcass today that stared at me with a haunting hollow gaze that followed me as I walked past it. It was so disconcerting that I retraced my couple-few steps to see if it was paralyzed or dazed. It lay on its back with unruffled feathers and the legs pulled in slightly. I imagined it sat like one of Audubon’s recently killed specimens; waiting patiently to become the animated subject of one of his paintings.

As I looked down at the bird its gaze was deeper than I imagined a bird’s could be. I imagine birds, especially doves like this bird, having the flighty stare of the eponymous “bird-brained”. The gaze was deep and black. It was several seconds of staring, and perhaps a shift in my shadow that let a little more light fall on the carcass, before I noticed a bit of skull in the stare. The bird’s head had been hollowed out, presumably by insects overnight, and the complicating stare was only shadow.

I believe the bird’s death progressed thusly: first the bird was flooded with the emotions and pain associated with the insult that killed it, then, as the support systems went offline, the brain ceased to provide an adequate mechanism to coordinate thoughts and everything was dumped as a jumble of unfiltered perception, then the brain turned off and there were no more thoughts. Later the brain would be eaten by insects. I bet the insects bored their way into the fatty neural tissue through the delicately soft and wet eyes.

“The eyes are a doorway to the soul” –unknown

There is a line of classical belief that takes the knowledge that the brain is the thinking organ of the body and uses faulty logic to suggest that those creatures which eat the brain gain some of the thoughts of the creature that used that brain while alive. There should be some pupating maggot meditating on the fact that the sunflower seeds in Hickman Canyon are particularly tasty this year. Another is probably just reliving the question: “Will this red tailed hawk be my friend if I say hello?”

Although it is somewhat humorous to imagine some carrion-feeding insect reliving the last bad decision of this bird it requires too many peculiar leaps of irrationality to make that something that is believable. The implications are interesting. Imagine a dermestidae beetle, which ingested the last fateful decision of the dove, being eaten by another bird; would this confer selective advantage to the new possessor of this dead dove’s wisdom? Could wisdom and knowledge be calculated by caloric content?

We impart meaning and substance to the fate of our most precious organs, but the more incredible implications of that become awkward to process. This is one of the things that faith is used for; to stifle questions about the implications of what is believed. I think it is better to just not believe. Just because it is fun to imagine fantastical possibilities does not mean we have to also believe in them. Belief is so cumbersome that it prevents imagining the complete vibrant spectrum of fantastical impossibilities.

I had seen the bird staring at me. I imagined that it was lying paralyzed beside the road; only able to plead its case with the look in its eyes. I had wondered, for a few brief seconds, if it thought I was a predator or instead a creature that would save it from being easy unmoving prey for a predator. I imagined all of these thoughts, most of which were probably too complex for a live dove’s brain, occurring just behind that hollow stare.

Sign for Utah Pride Parade 2016

Here is the finished sign I talked about a couple posts ago.  It is amazingly similar to the original design.  Clearly legible from a long distance.  I like it.  It is made with a measurable amount of win.

But there is hidden win behind the artsy semi-free-form lettering and awesome color scheme.  This sign is made of fiberboard, and is orders of magnitude stronger than ones made with standard poster-board or foam core.   This sign could withstand the impact of a vigorously launched rock or bottle.  In order to leverage this capability I designed a handle setup that allows the sign to work as a shield.  Here is a picture of the back.

 I put some paint on the back so I could tell which side was up without looking at the front.  The handle system is constructed from two sections of 2x3s and 2 pieces of 1 inch hardwood dowel.   The dowels act as the actual handles.  Here is a closeup of a dowel.

The handles allow the sign to be carried without grasping it from the sides.  Fingers do not obstruct the front of the sign, and the fingers are protected from being bashed.  This was, of course, the real reason for the handle system, but the fact that it turns the sign into a modestly effective shield is a bonus capability.

*UPDATE*

And here is the sign just about to be used in the parade:

Transgender Studies

I am in love with a transgendered woman, and this fact has caused some issues in my life that might be of interest to anyone else who finds themselves in such a situation.

The real reason I’m writing this is because the relationship has ended in a spectacular ghosting, and I am not handling it as dispassionately as the situation requires. Writing helps me organize my thoughts so they do not go crashing into one another as they pinball around my skull. If this helps someone else it is a wonderful thing.

The love in question is of the complete investment kind; pride gambled and proposals made. The ghosting took my best friend and lover. These are problems with falling in love, and I am currently recommending against doing that with anyone of any gender, cis or trans.

1) You are gay

To the individual, like myself, who is a 0 or 1 on the Kinsey scale this is a bit of an interesting discovery. I think a male at the 5 or 6 end of the scale might have a more difficult discovery, that of being in love with a woman, to process, but I do not know how they would get there. People in the middle bisexual ground of the scale might be able to divide up each gendered interaction so as to avoid any big new discovery.

Yes there were people who called me “FAG” or acquaintances who drilled down on describing the moral repugnancy of homosexual interaction in the same sentence as asking me about that person who drove me around in that red infinity. There were also the changes in attitudes at work, and the dis-inclusion in events. These are not the stuff of an important personal discovery, but I do wish I had talked more about them when they happened so that I could have avoided some of the secret festering that gave these incidents any importance at all. They are not worth mentioning now except to state that they are not worth mentioning.

The fact that you are gay is probably not a factor in the interaction you have with your transgendered love one; although it might be. I do not have much breadth to my romantic experiences with transgendered women; there is just this woman with whom I fell in love (let’s call her Beatrice after Dante) and another woman with whom I went on one date. The single date woman took me back to her place and while we were sitting close on her couch offered to show me pictures of her on her (pre-transition) Mormon mission, and offered to show me pictures of herself on the boys’ basketball team in high school, and offered explanations about how the transgender “thing” was related to soft-core porn and a desire to cross-dress that got out of hand. My reticence to warm to the idea of realizing she was male baffled her.

Beatrice insisted that I was not gay to my face, but gleefully identified as “All of the Above” when asked by people whose opinions she valued where she fell on the LGBT spectrum; it only takes simple arithmetic to figure out what that meant she thought of me. This was a little dishonest, but it was probably due to her changing her mind about what she thought depending on the situation in which she was thinking it.

Since the moment I realized the ghosting was a permanent situation -and I avoided this realization- I have been trying to date. After a few dates, and some minor physical contact, it is common for a woman to want to know something about your previous love interests, and that latest one which still darkens your countenance like a cloud across the full moon when mentioned attracts a good bit of special attention. Reactions range from one end of a spectrum where a former flame, whom I was sure would never speak to me again when I dumped her for Beatrice, accused me of purposefully having Beatrice be transgender in order to hurt her; “That was so hurtful of you” and “That really creeps me out”. On the other end a new interest declared that “She knew that there was something different about me; that I was gay!” when I told her Beatrice was transgendered, and she then proceeded to put her tongue in my mouth to demonstrate how that excited her.

I have few lesbian acquaintances, and they tend to be a little more academic in deciphering the interactions of men with transgendered women, at least when they are dealing with men, or at the very least when they are dealing with me. Here is an example: “I tend to see transgendered people as homophobes who had to switch genders to become comfortable with their sexuality. That comes from my own academic training in queer and gender theory, is actually a position shared by a lot of lesbian feminists.” What this is saying is that I am gay and Beatrice actually hates me for it. Given the way I’ve been ghosted this might be surprisingly insightful.

Instead of creating some synthesis of the information that most people in my life: “do not believe a transsexual is a woman” and the fact that Beatrice was the woman I loved I attempted to simply ignore everything (including Beatrice) that suggested Beatrice was in a special class of women. I thought of her simply as possessed of exotic charms, and was all the more enthralled as a result. Perhaps a synthesis of information would have made it less awkward to be a non-homosexual gay male.

Interestingly my several gay male friends did not consider me gay. This brings me to the second important aspect of loving a transgendered woman.

2) You are a perverted abomination


In high school a good friend came out to me, and we are still good friends. He will answer my awkward questions, and fill in the gaps I manage to create while stumbling them out with knowledge about me and what I might really mean. When I “came out” to him about my love for Beatrice he called me an abomination. “Perverse” he called me. These were the knee-jerk reactions, and he quickly began dialing them back; trying to re-frame them as a bad joke.

When a transgendered woman undergoes gender reassignment surgery they flay open her penis and sew it back together into a convoluted pretzel of penis bits that resembles a natural vagina. Watching a video, even a cartoon, of the procedure can be cringe-worthy for any man, but here is probably no group of individuals more sensitive to the unnaturalness of this procedure than men who like both their own penises and the penises on other men.

Other gay male friends would talk in hushed tones of how awful the genitals must be; as if the insight of people who thought vaginas in general were icky would tell me something new and devastating. Nobody ever got around to asking me how things worked or felt; I never got the chance to answer that there was just a wonderfully sensitive point of interaction between this woman that I loved and me, and that it was all beautiful and Beatrice. Yes, I realize how delusional that sounds, and I "just never mentioned" being in love with a post-op transgendered woman to many of my gay male friends or acquaintances.

The genitals are so important. If you fall in love with a transgender woman do not fool yourself into ignoring the status of her genitals; they are not central to her identity but ignoring the status just because you love her regardless is not adequate. The status of the genitals is so important that the transgendered woman who undergoes gender reassignment surgery puts her life at significant risk and endures tremendous pain to change that status. Beatrice and I started dating before her gender reassignment surgery. She returned from California and recovered in my bed while my daughters –as much as is possible for teenagers- helped to care for her.

I was told by non-romantically connected transgender acquaintances that no male could provide the validation needed for a transgendered woman’s acceptance of her own genitals. This revelation would come in the form of intricately detailed stories.  It is vitally important to have the input of other people when dating a transgender woman as talking about special issues with her will confuse the fact that she is "a woman - period" (yes I am aware of the twisted double entendre there), and that confusion will abort most meaningful dialog; especially critical conversations about subtle transgender identity issues.  "Passable" and genital adequacy are important identity issues that cannot just be dismissed with the waving of hands. 


Beatrice would talk of her desire for a female lover, and I would know that would make me obsolete. I could never share access to my genitals with her and say that hers were just as good and mean anything worthwhile by it. It was taking on a female “friend with benefits” (hours after securing a pledge of romantic and sexual fidelity from me) that started the clock on the last two weeks she would ever speak to me.  Most of what she had to tell me those two weeks concerned her complete and sudden unavailability, and my own insignificance.

This kind of sudden change is not just incidental to the problems a man faces when he falls in love with a transgendered woman, and it brings us to the next issue.

3. Abandonment and trauma issues.

I have presented the problems that I faced, but these are trivial compared with the trials a transgendered woman must endure. People would just slip around corners to avoid me when I walked through the Tooele Walmart with Beatrice, but when she was not there I was treated like an almost normal person, and almost wished I was still being avoided. The transgendered woman can expect to be abandoned by friends and family in addition to the annoying acquaintances who shop at the same time. Beatrice raised several children who –two because of the influence of the Mormon church- have not spoken to her in years; they have not spoken, their spouses have not spoken, the grandchildren have not spoken. There is a palpable loss that I could not comprehend those times I held her sobbing frame into the night those losses remembered themselves. AOD and AYD would receive unsolicited hugs the next time I saw them and wonder why I was tearing up just to see them.

The hurt inflicted on transgendered women by those they love (and by strangers, but whose sting hurts worse?) can result in PTSD. I have never met a transgendered woman who has not experienced profound and horrible hurt. Beatrice was comparatively lucky to have only experienced the truly heartbreaking treatment that she did, but the trauma associated with abandonment can result in PTSD symptoms. These include: Panic attacks related to unconscious triggers, Hyper-vigilance related to perceived threats, Emotional flashbacks, Vulnerability in social situations, Attraction to those who are unavailable, and Heightened emotional responses related to abandonment triggers, such as feeling slighted, criticized, or excluded. In severe cases PTSD can lead to drug or alcohol abuse, depression, self-depreciation, and even complete sleep deprivation with hallucinations and suicidal ideation.

These issues are not specific to transgendered women. Many non-veteran members of our society can exhibit them: Drug addicts, Childhood abuse survivors, and others. They are not issues that are best dealt with by ignoring or actively minimizing them, and they can spiral out of control into life-altering episodes if left unchecked.

The two weeks of disjoint imperative panic that lead to the ghosting was not the first severe episode of past trauma induced behavior. When Beatrice was recovering in my house I offered to let her stay there as long as she wanted, and I told her that I hoped she would want to long after she was fully recovered. I did not realize that such an offer would cause severe panic. She almost immediately HAD to leave; she had no coherent reason and attempted actions like lifting heavy suitcases because she perceived the threat of popping stitches and bleeding out on my floor as less dangerous than staying with the man who loved her. Conversations dashed down logical dead ends just to get somehow from whatever was being said to the end that was needed to escape the threat. If not for the medication and pain I do not think she would have ever come back into my life; the current ghosting was done with a sober mind, and though it appeared no less panicked, there is no mediating externality to turn her around.

 

If you fall in love with a transgendered woman you may need to find out about her triggers, and discover ways of responding to them that may be outside of your experience set.  

I’ve used up too many electrons on just three issues. There are more, but so few will even read this far.

In places the bitterness of my feelings about the breakup have washed over you with my words. I did write this in part to look at those feelings. I have learned to house the impossible hope of her return with the imperative that I just move on to some imagined goal. Neither is based in reason, but if I don’t tie them to a bit of virtual paper they crash about in my head and make a mess of things.

This essay is not designed as a dispassionate analysis of all the things that lead to the breakup. Rest assured that I contributed mightily to the end, but this is my essay, and I did not want to write that stuff down here.  There is also the confusion of an on and off relationship.  The whole thing is messy the way love is when it hits reality; at least the way it hits the reality of my life. I’ve got all the crap in my head though, and I’ve played it back till the anxiety and self-recriminations burn it onto my more random thoughts.

I don’t think loving a transgendered woman is any harder or more doomed than loving a genetic girl, but all love is probably doomed. Loving Beatrice was more than easy. There are specific issues though, and I hope, if you are in love, you can avoid some of the situational specific landmines I stepped on.

And if you can’t, well, I told you so.