Making Sense of It All

Ms. Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.

Gladness & Sadness

I am beginning this month's column on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, which is followed nine days from now by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This nine day period is appropriate for reflection, a time for reflecting on the sweetness as well as the bitterness of life, a time for gladness as well as sadness.

As I look back on my life, not just during this past year but also during several decades, I can rejoice at the fact that I am at last living with a personal identity that is satisfying to me. I am glad I am no longer living in the closet of my soul, no longer harboring what I experienced for so long as a shameful secret, namely, my gender dysphoria.

I am truly glad and relieved that I can now live openly as a woman, even though I was born with a male body. My attitude, my natural inclinations, and my estrogenic progress have all helped me to function as a female in our bipolar society and world. I now find myself relating more easily to people, being more creative, freer to think and to feel than ever before. I have less anger towards life in general and more love for myself and for others. I am glad to be feeling this way and thus truly thankful that all this has come about.

I also find myself able to celebrate my Jewish heritage with greater enthusiasm than ever before, for I am no longer ashamed of myself in the eyes of God. I feel that I am simply one of God's creatures, albeit different from the majority of them, but as entitled as any of them to live on this earth. So it is with a newly found enthusiasm and joy and a basic sense of dignity that I can celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

At the same time that I am filled with gladness I am also filled with sadness. You may think that I am contradicting myself, for how can I be glad and sad at the same time? But the truth of the matter is that I have much sadness in my life at the same time that I rejoice in my personal emergence. For most of my life I was accepted as a normal male, in the family, at work, and socially. In other words, I was outwardly acceptable. But on the inside, so to speak, I was terribly unhappy. However, although I am now more happy on the inside with my hard-earned self-recognition and self-acceptance, I am no longer as acceptable as I once was on the outside, whether in the family, at work, or socially. Now don't get me wrong: I am still part of a family, I do have work, and I have social involvements. But my various human connections are now more limited in scope than they once were.

For example, my three children, all of whom are adults ranging in age from twenty-six to thirty-two, feel that I am great to talk to but funny to look at. As a parent I can understand their chagrin at my gender change, but I do know they love me. They just have difficulty seeing their father look more like an aunt than the father they once knew. I tell them that I will always be their father, but of the three children, two of whom are male, it is my daughter with whom I have actually grown closer. She says that I am more present, more in the here and now, than ever before. But at the same time that my relationship with her makes me glad, I am sad about the increasing distance between me and my two sons.

My wife loves me and is still with me, but she admits openly that my gender change is difficult for her to handle. We live more like two girl friends than husband and wife. Our social life together has thus become limited to situations where we are not expected to appear as a married couple. I am glad she still loves me and is still with me, for I love her very much, but I am sad about our limited sphere of joint activity.

I am doing work I enjoy, but my history as a transsexual goes with me wherever I seek clients or employment of any kind. This does not mean that I go around announcing to the world that I am a transsexual, but my personal history lurks in the background and sometimes makes itself known on legal documents as well as on chance encounters with people from my past. I find myself wishing that people's attitudes were more liberal now that I feel freer as a person to pursue my goals. I am certainly glad to be functioning more effectively as the person I now am, but I am truly sad about the limitations imposed upon me by narrow social and legal attitudes.

I have learned that both gladness and sadness are part of life in general and part of my own life in particular. I have learned that the sweetness of Rosh Hashanah is inseparable from the bitterness of Yom Kippur. I realize more than ever that I encompass within my person all of my experience, the bitter as well as the sweet. When all is said and done, I am now more of a total person than ever before, because that totality incorporates the sweetness as well as the bitterness, the gladness as well as the sadness, of my total existence. It is this totality, this sense of oneness, a sense of personal integration, which at last I am beginning to experience and which I can now more easily claim as my own. Such ownership makes for a gladness no sadness can ever erase.

Want to comment? Send email to Dr. Etscovitz at hmdm@voicenet.com.


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