Our mascotPapers presented at the 2nd International Congress on Sex & Gender, June 19-22, 1997

Gender Change and the Sense of Self: A Personal Perspective

Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.
Gender Educator and Counselor

For as long as I can remember, I have always felt different from others, different from family and from everyone else around me. I have never been able to understand that difference until recently. For many years, actually for most of my life, I only knew that I was very lonely, increasingly depressed, and ashamed of my sexual fantasies. I would like to share with you a poem which I wrote not too long ago and which can serve as a basis for my sharing with you what a life of being different has been like and what sense, if any, I can make of it all. My poem is called, "I Disappeared:"

I disappeared before my eyes
the day that I was born.
I had my share of mother's milk,
and blankets kept me warm,
but cold and hunger swept my soul
till I became invisible
and lost my human form.

I learned to read my parents' lips
but never read my own,
until at last I lost my voice
and learned to dream alone.

And then as if to complicate
the world behind my eyes,
I soon began to feel that I
belonged among the girls,
who seemed to be the favored ones
with carefree curves and curls.

In secret shame I hid my heart
behind a blend of boyish acts,
but all the bikes and trains and trucks
could not erase the inner facts.

The emptiness within my soul
was filled for years with school and work,
but nothing seemed to last,
for though I tried to fill the void,
I could not form a past.

And so I died a double death
by disappearing twice,
until I learned the painful truth:
my deaths would not suffice.

I had to reach beyond the shell
that I had safely made,
beyond the safety of my dreams,
beyond my long charade.

I found my way to helping hands,
to hearts that hugged my soul,
and gradually I heard my voice
till life became my goal.

I will not disappear again,
though sometimes I despair,
for self-belief is always more
than curves and curly hair.

The human form will always be
far more than what the eye can see.
To be oneself should not seem strange;
the difficulty is the change.

Let us look, first, at the sense of self which this poem describes. To be more accurate, let us look at the suppression of my sense of self, for it was as if I were being raised to hide my true feelings. Aside from the gender confusion which I began to experience in my teenage years and which, as my poem depicts, I also proceeded to hide, I lived my whole life in an emotional closet. I am reminded of one of those large, oversized walk-in closets which are sometimes the size of a small room and which can seemingly contain tons of things. Similarly, my emotional closet was large and all-encompassing. Into it I packed my feelings about family members, my hopes and dreams, my frustrations and anger, and, of course, my gender confusion. In a very real sense, I packed it all in.Without even realizing it at the time, I was giving up on my true sense of self by going into a closet that contained not just my gender issue but all of me.

A psychiatrist once remarked that I came by my personal difficulties honestly, in that my parents were unwilling, or more likely unable, to attend to my feelings. My mother did spend some time with me, though she never expressed love. I have no recollection of ever being hugged by her except, perhaps, as a form of greeting. In fact, what started out as at least some measure of attentiveness by her when I was a child turned into emotional oppressiveness by the time I became a teenager. Her own insecurities, anger, and general neediness left very little room for the expression of my own feelings.

My father expressed even less affection than did my mother. But rather than engulf me with his feelings, whatever they were, he kept everything inside and so excluded me completely from his inner life. At the same time he bombarded me with his goals and purposes for my life. He was also punitive towards me, involving both verbal and physical abuse. The point is that neither my mother nor my father really listened to me, and so I felt invisible as a person.

Not surprisingly, home was never home for me, at least not in an emotionally satisfying way. I thus developed some interests which served to create an imaginary world in which I could live, at least temporarily, with some degree of sanity. For example, I never wanted to leave movie theaters, for it meant returning to a place - to a world - where I did not belong. At least in the movie theater I felt alive for two hours at a time. Aterwards I would reluctantly return to a private holocaust where I was a walking dead person. I did what I was told, perhaps hoping that my obedience would be rewarded with love. I also developed an interest in Lionel trains, especially since my first name was Lionel. I thus felt special, if only symbolically, as the trains responded to my commands within a world of my own design and construction. But outside of that little world I was the train with the name "Lionel" obeying someone else's commands on someone else's track at someone else's speed.

The lack of meaningful inclusion and love in a cold parental world also brought about a variety of personal behaviors as symptoms of my inner unrest. I blinked my eyes, clucked my throat, and dragged my feet. I sucked my thumb till I was eight years old and wet my bed till I was thirteen. I bit my nails till there was nothing left for my teeth to grab. I was always seen as a day dreamer, someone who was always far away and whose inner clock always ran behind the clocks of the world. If real trains ran like I did, they would always be running late. I think one of the factors in my development as a fairly good teenage cross-country runner was my daily sprint to school to avoid being late.

As a teenager I also secretly embarked on a masturbatory voyage as I explored a private world of sexual fantasy. I became my own movie theater. I suppose any one of these behaviors can be explained in itself as simply being quirky and as being nothing greatly out of the ordinary, but in the aggregate they suggest a high degree of inner unrest. In my particular case, they represented the outer edge of great inner pain. No one really sensed my inner pain, and its outcroppings were simply seen as behaviors that would supposedly be outgrown. But my teenage years were especially unhappy and lonely.

In the midst of this deeply rooted and painful self-suppression, and in addition to the desperate movie-going and train-collecting, I was still part of life's daily activities, at least on the surface. Participation in my childhood and teenage years meant going to school, joining the Cub Scouts (but not the Boy Scouts), taking music lessons for the piano and then the trumpet, and participating in sports, especially individual ones, like tennis, swimming, and, of course, running. I was always interested in girls, though I was confused and troubled as a teenager when I began to wish I were one of them. As an adult I bought a motorcycle, grew a beard, and earned a doctor's degree, though not necessarily in that order. I was married, had three children, divorced, and then remarried. For twenty years I was a teacher, primarily in higher education, and then for ten years I sold high-priced European automobiles.

My so-called "participation" in these activities, as my poem points out, was more of a charade, more of a performance, than a genuine involvement. I was never my true self, though I did not know what that true self entailed. Instead, I always felt like a pretender, like I was simply going through the motions of participating but was not really present. I sought psychiatric help for many years but continued to feel lost and detached, both personally and interpersonally. It was as if my parents had written a script for me which I had been faithfully following since the day I was born but which somehow did not reflect the way I wanted to feel about myself. Actually, I knew less how I wanted to feel and more how I did not want to feel. In other words, I was more familiar with what felt bad than with what felt good. Even now, though my parents have been dead for several years, their scripts are not easy to bury. I may have forgotten most of what I learned intellectually in school, but what I learned emotionally as a child is not as easily forgotten. And yet, as I have finally realized, one has to face one's inner life in order to enjoy one's outer existence.

Complicating my inner life and therefore my enjoyment of life as a whole was a gradual but steady increase in my confusion about my own gender. My feminine wishes would not leave me alone. No matter where I went or what I did, they went with me and intruded upon my consciousness. They were with me at home, at work, on my motorcycle, on vacations, even on my honeymoon with my second spouse, and especially in my sexual fantasies. They simply would not go away. Moreover, I was ashamed of my feminine wishes, for they did not match my body and my social position and responsibilities. I felt like an inner freak, though on the outside I was seen as a more or less typical American male.

By the time I was fifty-five years old, thoughts of suicide became a daily occurrence. I was telling myself that, in one decisive moment, I could put an end to my double inner torment. Then I would no longer have to live with my buried sense of self nor with my buried femininity which was only complicating my development of a sense of self. I just wanted to die and be done with it all. A few years earlier I had had an actual head-on car accident, the most serious of four car accidents within a matter of months. Miraculously, I escaped unscathed in each instance. But still I was not convinced that I needed help or that there was really any help available, for I had given up on psychiatry in general.

It was my current spouse's near-fatal stroke and brief but frightening coma which, ironically, served to wake me up from my own deep emotional and spiritual sleep. In the emergency room, where she was convulsing and vomiting and facing the possibility of death without ever waking up, I suddenly felt what it means to be alive. Out of my love for her, I began to sense my own heart, my own pain, my own existence. By reaching out to her from the depths of my soul, I suddenly realized that I, too, had a soul, that I had feelings, that I wanted to be alive for her. I also wanted to be alive for me. I wanted to be visible. It was the trauma of this event that at last shocked me into seeking help, for at last I could not bear the thought of myself dying without ever becoming visible as a person in my own right. And so, as my poem says, "I found my way to helping hands, to hearts that hugged my soul."

Two major factors in my background made it possible for me finally to seek help. As we have seen, my parents certainly did not help me to develop emotional strength, but they did provide me with good schooling and an appreciation of the arts, especially written expression. For example, I have kept a personal journal for forty years, which has helped me to express and to handle my innermost thoughts and feelings, so that they have become objectified enough to exist outside of me where I can more readily keep an eye on them, if you will. And for over a year now, in the Transgender Forum on the World Wide Web, I have been writing a monthly column called, "Making Sense of It All," in which I have continued to do what I have been doing in my journal and what I am doing right now, namely, speaking about my own life, especially about the development of a sense of self and about deep, dark secrets like gender confusion. Even though I have been severely depressed at times, it is my interest in writing which has helped me to face my inner difficulties, both to control and to understand them rather than succumb to them.

Another major factor contributing to my decision to seek help was the genuine love I had received from Mildred, originally my baby-sitter and who, beginning when I was two years old, became a substitute mother for me for over forty years. It was Mildred who gave me the emotional and spiritual strength to face life's difficulties. With her I felt alive. My parents let me stay with Mildred and her family a great deal, perhaps because I was not an easy child for my parents to handle. (Of course, as I have indicated, my parents were not easy for a child to handle.) But on that northern Maine farm with Mildred and her family, I was at peace, even if only on selected weekends. Those moments of inner peace have been a beacon of hope for me throughout my life. Mildred is no longer physically alive, but her spirit, her love, and her soul remain a treasure that has enriched my own life beyond any words.

And so it was that, encouraged by the soul-deep memory of Mildred's love and supported by the written glimpses of my own soul, I finally saw, in the threat of physical death to my spouse, the ongoing threat of my own living death. At last I saw my own lost humanity, for in the stark reality of that traumatic moment, I felt the impact of the living present. A hospital emergency room had suddenly become a delivery room from which each of us would emerge in search of rebirth as a human being. Since then my own rebirth has involved gender therapy, active membership in Renaissance, and participation in a variety of gender-related activities, as well as a more genuine involvement in life as a whole.

Looking back on all of this, I am led to the conclusion that, transgendered or not, my life is fundamentally no different from anyone else's. When each of us emerges from the womb, we are suddenly thrust into a world which does not guarantee social acceptance nor a meaningful existence. In a very real sense we all face the threat of loneliness and meaninglessness and thus a world of uncertainty. It is true, of course, that we each encounter different circumstances in terms of which we face this uncertainty. Our culture, family, religion, economic background, genetic traits, and the general risk of just living all vary for each of us. Nevertheless, just by being human we ultimately choose what to do with these various factors and thus what to do with our lives. The choices may involve outright acceptance of life as it is presented to us, or radical change, or a combination of the two. The point is that, when we are born, we all appear and then, whether we realize it or not, we automatically disappear. We then spend the rest of our lives in search of ourselves, our true selves, until some of us are reborn more fully human. So I feel that, fundamentally speaking, I am no different from anyone else in my search for a fulfilled life.

This search for fulfillment is often thought of as a concern for one's soul, for one's innermost being, usually in the context of one's body. Most people are able to take their physical existence for granted and are free to explore what it means to have a soul in relation to the body they inhabit. In my case, however, I have never really been happy with my body, let alone comfortable with my soul. For most of my life I have felt disembodied, detached from myself, so that I was never able to develop a real sense of self and to feel confident and glad to be alive. I also felt detached from all that was around me, so that, even in the midst of a noisy social situation, I was invisibly and silently floating in space. I felt I had no real body with which to anchor myself in the physical world and in terms of which to develop a real sense of self. I am describing what might be regarded as a severe form of mental illness, in that a person who is not connected to the outside world and who is also disconnected from himself is not someone we usually think of as being in a healthy state of mind. And yet that is precisely how I felt for many years. I always thought I was mentally ill. Now I believe I was simply, and deeply, unhappy in both body and soul.

Much to my own surprise, the way to my soul has been through my body. My gender change has complicated my search for meaning and involvement in life, but it has also become the key to my soul and thus to the development of a workable sense of self. My emergence as a more fully functioning human being following my gender change has helped me to realize that my gender struggle has been a significant factor in my more general struggle to develop as a person. At last I feel physically alive, and, as if magically, I feel spiritually more alive. I feel freer and more confident to explore other aspects of myself, such as my writing and my music, and to tackle the everyday problems of living. The invisibility I once experienced has been replaced by the ability to see myself as part of the ongoing struggle of all human beings to find some measure of happiness in the context of a lived life. As my poem concludes:

I will not disappear again,
though sometimes I despair,
for self-belief is always more
than curves and curly hair.


The human form will always be
far more than what the eye can see.
To be oneself should not seem strange;
the difficulty is the change.

Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.
P.O.Box 471 Willow Grove, PA 19090
Tel. (215) 657-1560
Fax. (215) 659-1331
E-Mail: hmdm@voicenet.com



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Mildred L., and Rounsley, Chloe Ann. TRUE SELVES: Understanding Transsexualism - For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996.

Miller, Niela. COUNSELING IN GENDERLAND: A Guide for You and Your Transgendered Client. Boston: Different Path Press, 1996.

Needleman, Jacob. MONEY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Whyte, David. THE HEART AROUSED: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

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