…

Another after-dinner conversation with friends is fast sliding into an education-giving experience for the Trans Woman. As plates are cleaned with bread and yet more wine and fruit and chocolate is passed around the table, she finds herself in the role of teacher again and wishes for the hundredth time that day that she just had a different body.

“You see, my gender doesn’t really feel like a choice. It’s not something I’m doing because it’s radical or cool or even political. It’s just my experience of life. You have tits, I don’t. But we’re both women. I think gender is political, but that’s not what makes me Trans.”

“But you’re a Queer activist – of course it’s political. And actually while I’m being honest with you, I don’t think its a very good kind of political.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This idea of being a ‘Woman’. It’s a stereotype and Queer theory breaks down all these simple binaries anyway. It would be more radical to use ‘they’ as a pronoun if you don’t believe in gender.”

“Wait a second, you’re a woman. And you use ‘she’ as a pronoun. What’s the difference? Shall I call you ‘they’ because it’s more radical?”

“Of course not, I’m a feminist and my identity is super important to me. But I’m not choosing to change my gender from one thing to another.”

“Well, neither am I.”

And later, after a few more glasses of wine…

“But I don’t get it. I know you say you feel like a woman, but for me you’ll always be a guy. Sometimes you’re a guy in a dress. But you’re still a guy.”

“I don’t really care if you don’t get it, that’s not important to me and I’m tired of explaining it. I’m just asking for the basic respect of using the right pronoun when you talk about me. Just like I wouldn’t talk about you as ‘she’ because you’d find it weird.“

“Too right I’d find it weird. It’s weird.”

“Well…anyway… Can someone pass the wine…?”

And even later as the first rays of sun start to come in through the shutters and everyone’s collapsed on the sofa half asleep but still talking. As a bottle lies unseen quietly leaking red wine on the carpet and the cat’s got up on the table and is licking the last of the chocolate off a plate…

“But then he said that.. erm.. I mean she said that…”

“Come on it’s been years since I’ve been using ‘she’, at some point you just need to get it right.”

“Hey, don’t start this again and don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. We’re all trying, ok? You should be happy that we try. You asked us to respect you and we respect you, what more do you want?”

“You to not mess up my gender pronoun every other sentence.”

“Look, I don’t know where you get off sometimes. Not everyone knows about this trans thing of yours and you should be more patient.”

“You’re telling me to be patient? When you leave the house do you constantly have to check that you’re wearing the right thing to fit society and if not, go back and get changed? Just in case – because you don’t want to end up dead in a skip. Because you can’t stand it when people stare at you and make comments under their breath. Do you have the entire world telling you you’re one thing, when you feel like something else entirely? Do you have your family telling you you’re a freak, your friends that you’re not radical enough and your housemates that you should just be patient?

“Yes, yes I get it. I know it’s hard and whatever.  But what do you want me to do about it? It’s not my fault that people are the way they are. It’s the way we’re told to be, the way we’re socialised, you know. ”

“So although I’m suffering the world’s transphobia, I still need to be patient? Even though you have all this privilege of being a bioguy and never being scared in the street at night, there’s nothing you can do to help me? Even though I suffer people’s stupidity everyday I need to just accept it and understand that people can’t help it? How can you say this shit? I thought you were an activist. I thought you wanted to change the way things are.”

“Don’t shout at me! Look, before you, I’d never met a trans person, ok? I’d never thought about it in my life…”

“Why not?”

“Cos it didn’t affect me I guess.”

“But you do have a gender experience. Everyone does. Just that yours as a guy gives you a tonne of privilege and mine really doesn’t. You do anti-racist work, if I was Black and was suffering racism would you tell me to just put up with it and be patient? Tell me to see it from your point of view? Tell me that White people are just socialised this way and there’s nothing we can do?”

“You have privilege as a guy too. I almost never see you wearing a dress in the street.”

“Really, that seems like such a privilege to you….?”

* * *

Next week dancing happily in a party at the anarchist social centre, the Trans Woman is feeling good. Despite a few boring conversations in the toilet queue (“Why do you care if I want to wait in the longer queue?” “Because guys pee everywhere, that’s why.” “But I sit down just like you do! And I’m not a fucking guy” ) she’s having a good time. The music is close to perfect and she feels every beat as she writhes on the dancefloor holding her beer.  She thinks back to all the big conversations happening in her house at the moment, all the meetings that need to happen in the next few days, but she’s too happy to think about it and anyway, this is a really good remix…

Suddenly she’s shocked back into the moment as a hand goes up her dress and squeezes her ass. Another hand crushes her temporary tits and the drunken face of someone she recognizes from meetings leers at her and says something she doesn’t even hear over the music. She looks at the people behind the bar, she looks at the women from the toilet queue, she looks at someone too drunk to stand and slowly collapsing in the corner. She’ll get no support here, she thinks to herself.  The ‘Queer’ guy who just harassed her has disappeared but this isn’t her party any more. 

She gets dressed without a word, tucks her dress into her jeans and hiding deep in the armour of her leather jacket, she heads back to the street. No-one even hears her slam the door.

…

With a great sigh, our explorer collapses into the sofa releasing a cloud of dust caught by the sunlight.  She holds a glass of ice water against her face and almost cries with exhaustion. What a day, she thinks to herself, this endless heat and humidity and just so, so much to do it seems like it’ll never finish. Everyday, the endless meetings that just seem to get longer the more we try to streamline them.  Everyday, the demos that just get crazier the more we try to plan them.  

The events of the morning rush through her mind as she relaxes into the ugly, but incredibly comfortable sofa she rescued last month from the street.  Drinking down the ice water and feeling the frosty glass against her fingertips she begins to become entranced in the minutae of the moment.  The sounds of roadworks down the street.  A male blackbird somewhere far off trying to make himself heard against the din of the city.  The sunlit dust settling back over the sofa and her t-shirt heavy with sweat.  Feeling calmer by the second her thoughts turn for the first time in ages to spirituality.

For our tired explorer, activism and spirituality have always been two sides of the same leaf.  For her, one leads to, and supports, the other and both are essential to living in a better way in this world. Because they are so close, they both feed each other, and both are starved when left alone.  

Now, after months of violence, of endless heady meetings and no time to breathe, our explorer is ready to start searching for a spiritual counterpart to the activism that has dominated her life this year.  But where to start?  

Too tired to think about it she absent-mindedly picks up the paper from the coffee table and flicking through the pages she soon comes across an article about neo-paganism in the Israeli army.   The lunchtime heat and the soft sofa begin to take over her body and as her eyelids slowly become heavy and closed she feels herself transported…

A soldier in uniform about to join the Gaza operation gets on his knees. His heart and mind race from the stresses of his mission as he summons before him in his mind’s eye a Deity to give him strength and to bestill his fears. His Deity, though, is a controversial one. Rejecting his monotheist upbringing, this young neo-pagan, barely out of high school and already enlisted to an elite combat unit, has chosen to worship the Gods of old to give him strength in troubled times. Unlike many of his faith, he has chosen not to bring back to life the Gods of afar, of Celtic lands, India, nor even to enact the TV spells of Buffy, but instead has chosen to dedicate his worship to Anat, the Cana’anite Goddess of War.

As he lights a candle on the altar before him and closes his eyes in prayer he brings to his memory the ancient passage in which Anat appears as ‘a wild and furious warrior in a battle, wading knee-deep in blood, striking off heads, cutting off hands, binding the heads to her torso and the hands in her sash, driving out the old men and townsfolk with her arrows, her heart filled with joy.’  

No pagan worship of nature, of the oneness of humanity, or universal peace for this young soldier. He feels his ancient Goddess moving deep inside him, Her joy and bloodlust become his own.  He stands to attention and fearless now, feels ready for what is to follow. 

Back in the waking world, and after another week of interminable meetings our explorer is back on the search for guidance and decides to head to yoga class. The studio is packed today, the lunchtime sun drawing lines across the polished floor and the eager students stretching and chatting on their yoga mats waiting impatiently for the class to start. At least a third of the class are radical left activists enticed by the ‘community prices’ of the session and in need of a good stretch after months of anti-war struggle.

The teacher arrives late and looks flustered as she throws down her mat, quickly forms a half lotus and breathlessly begins to speak to her audience. Today she wants to share her stories of India: the mystical land of Israel’s children just out of the army.  She, like so many, went to that far away land to forget war, to find peace and to learn the ancient art of yoga. And now that she has reached great wisdom she is back in Tel Aviv to share it with those that should learn.  Today, she declares, she will share Ahimsa, the doing of no harm.  She begins with a story.

Yesterday, walking through the centre of town on the way to the coffeeshop, she was disturbed from her walking meditation on universal compassion by a group of noisy youths with banners. They were, it seems, protesting the latest massacre in Gaza and demanding accountability for the 1000 or so deaths so far this week. The demonstration ended, as so many do in these days, in arrests and police violence.

But protests like this are not The Way, she explains to her captive audience as the activists silently catch each other’s eyes across the room.  We must not fight one other.  We must not be divisive in our love.  We must find universal unity among all people.  And after all, she emplores her students, what else could we do?  This is a war that could not be avoided and anyway, she almost whispers, they attacked us first.  

She puts her hands together and guides her students into a sun salutation as the sound of a helicopter passes overhead.  Namaste.

Back in her apartment that afternoon and feeling more frustrated than ever, our explorer desperately searches the web in another, maybe final attempt to find spiritual solidarity in this land.  Buddhism. Meditation. Tel Aviv.  A hopeful looking page comes up, a meditation centre in the Middle East. A place to learn, to meditate and to find peace.  Perfect, she thinks to herself.

She notices a message highlighted in a box at the top of the page.  A profound wish is expressed for all the country to meditate and to send hope to the soldiers giving their lives in Gaza and Lebanon in these times to fight a necessary war to protect the peace. The message concludes – with no sense of irony and no mention of the countless, endless Palestinian deaths on the other side of this occupation – with the hope that we  may all find peace and inner harmony.  

They can stuff it up their root chakra! shouts out our explorer as she switches off the computer in a rage and storms out of the house.  She’s so angry she realises that she didn’t even bring her keys or phone with  her but still she walks on quickly with no destination in mind. She unconsciously holds her breath as she crosses a busy road of angry, honking drivers and their smokey vehicles. She storms on through the old town of Jaffa: a city that seems weighed down by its untold histories and she almost sneers as she passes by yet another group of tourists swallowing the official version explained to them by their smiling tourguide.  She rushes past the gentrified town centre, a disneyland of mosques and arabesque trophies of war until finally, breathlessly, she reaches the sea which opens up before her, sunlit and powerful beneath a perfect blue sky.  

Her timeless lover.   

She breathes deeply at last and runs across the beach tearing off her sandals as she reaches the sand. Without another thought she steps fully clothed into the warm water and the noise of the city behind her fades away. Welcome back, she’s told in the sounds of waves as she immerges herself in her lover’s body.  A peace fills her tired heart as the waves embrace and carry her under the hot sun, out and away from the concrete and smoke and police sirens. I’ve missed you, she whispers and finally with a great gulp of air she dives under the surface.  

Time passes. Her eyes open underwater, she sees the afternoon sun piercing through the surface – shafts of light broken by waves, filling the water with its warmth.   Somewhere way above the water a gull cries out, a cry of love and friendship.  She could stay here forever, she thinks and closes her eyes.  Home at last.

…

a stark field of grey. the final shafts of setting sun pierce the rain clouds which have been looming all day and are finally beginning to crack open as night draws in. the first few drops fall, hard and heavy onto our heroine’s face. she stands broken-hearted before a disney backdrop of light and dark and colours too vivid to be true: her shoulder’s stooped with the weight of the world and with so many words unsaid. the mountains themselves draw a breath as finally the air carrying the winds of thoughts which have blown hard for days, slows to stillness. silence but for a heart’s beat as the desert itself awaits the inevitable. a drop, heavier now, another and another. dust and bone welcome each drop as the clouds tear themselves apart and each drop becomes a thousand and with great abandon the sky releases its heavy load onto the world below. the mountains sigh with relief and welcome the deluge as lightning tears the evening sky. the soil, cracked and pained hisses with joy as drop after drop washes away its anguish. riverlets and streams burst forth from the mountainside. waterfalls explode over desert ridges. the world fills with water and drama at last and the world swells. our heroine is soaked through, her sins and pain released to the heavy soil below her. her sweat becomes the rain itself. her tears: the river. her voice and the lightning above cry out for more and more, to hold nothing back, to keep no more secrets.

and then, just as quickly it slows and ends, and silence returns. the world holds its breath once more. the clouds, empty and satisfied, draw back to reveal the night’s sky. moonlight and starlight fall upon our heroine, her wet skin reflecting the light of a thousand galaxies back into space. a deep breath of lung and soil. And a gentle, shy breeze begins to blow once more.

…

As Luke arrives to the 5 star hotel, nearly walks into the hotel restaurant in confusion and then nearly crashes into the wall-sized sliding glass door – almost invisible in it’s perfect cleanliness – he thinks to himself that he should have asked more money for these two hours. It’s been a while and there’s a moment of nervousness calling up to the room from the reception.  The receptionist smiles just as widely as he’s paid to and works hard to make everyone he smiles at feel like they deserve to be in a 5 star hotel.  Luke couldn’t feel more alien than in this sweeping and grandiose hotel where loud english speakers arrive with suitcases packed for the weekend larger than the backpack he’s lived out of for 8 years. But pushing these thoughts away he becomes the tourist he needs to be and smiles straight back and makes some joke about the weather and flirts just enough to pass.  He gets into the elevator and is crammed in with an extremely friendly American who wants to know everything about Europe in the time it takes to go up 3 floors. Luke smiles in kind and secretly hopes that his bag which is being held together with an emergency safety pin doesn’t fall apart and spill condoms and lube all over this guy’s shiny shoes and finally makes good his escape into the carpeted hallways.  

Sometimes 2 hours can be a lifetime. There’s fucking, of course with Luke being the studly top he is, daydreaming all the while about getting a falafal on the way home from work. Is it worth paying the extra euro for the really good falafal near home he wonders or should it be the cheaper one with the more vegan-looking sauce.. wait, what’s this guy saying? His face is half pushed into the super hotel pillows, but it sounds like ‘Oh baby, break that black ass, break it baby.’  Luke is confused but keeps up his rhythm.. this guy said he was strictly vanilla and now he’s giving himself racial abuse, what’s supposed to be happen now? Luke manages to squeeze out a few ‘Oh yeah’ s and ‘Mmm that’s it’ s but his heart’s not in it. He could never do the whole racial abuse thing.  It’s always been a political step too far.  Seriously, the first time he was asked to ‘train’ a ‘dog’ he had a speciesism crisis and had to rewrite the plot in his head that it wasn’t that dogs are lower than humans or that being one would be humiliating, just simply that he had before him a naughty dog that needed some training to be socialised and stop peeing on the carpet.  But anyway, this guy’s still busy giving himself verbal about his black butt and Luke’s quickly over his political crisis and is back to thinking about falafal. 

It’s all over very fast, thank god, and there’s still an hour and fourty minutes to kill. So the most detailed massage ever to take place takes place during which Luke learns that his client works for an oil company in Texas. The giant Big Brother screeb is flashing news about the election violence happening in the Congo while Luke diligently  works hard on the little knots accumulated from stressful oil meetings and efforts to commit us all to a destroyed climate.  As he works on his client’s aching feet he imagines him in Texas giving a conference with a peak oil bell curve projected behind him on a screen. As he works on the tense muscles of his inner thighs Luke imagines the day that he and this guy will be on the opposite sides of a riot police line – a look of recognition passing between them before the teargas separates them forever.  Time drags on and on and everything that can be massaged has been massaged twice and Luke has watched more news and weather than he has in months. When it’s all over, Texas Oil guy rolls on his back and stretches in pleasure like the little kitten that he isn’t and says ‘wow, that was the best’.  If he only knew thinks Luke to himself as he picks up his rent for the next 3 weeks and makes for the door.  It’s going to be the expensive falafal tonight after all…..

…

In the relentless heat of the late afternoon the group jump into the sea, releasing the day’s tensions and confusions, allowing the warm water to wash off dirt and sweat and hard work. They splash and fool around and imagine themselves dolphins or sharks and not the faulted humans who’ve been working and arguing the whole day thrown together on this alternative building camp in the Mexican desert, anarchists and corporate lawyers, strangers all. Yet now as they shark attack each other’s feet and dolphin splash salty water into faces that squeal with surprise, they forget all the world of experience and ideas that divides them. The water and the lowering sun seem to cleanse their every sin.

 

An hour later and most of the group are drying out on the sand, still enjoying the last sun of the day and watching Tina and the rest still splashing and swimming. Suddenly a cry goes out. And those still in the water gather hesitantly around something floating towards the beach. It’s a white puffer fish, fat, puffed out and dead, its vacant eyes staring back at the group into their very souls. Some of them look at it in fear, others in awe until another cry reveals another and another and another floating towards the shore. Just this morning, Tina had been reading about the trawlers who work these shallow oceans and using inhumanly large nets that scrape along the seabed take everything the sea has to offer and leave nothing behind but debris and the carcasses of the economically unviable. More and more puffers appear and the swimmers quickly and fearfully get out of the water. Tina stays alone in the water. She has only sadness for these victims of nets and greed. And as she looks to the beach where the group have started kicking the desecrated bodies of pufferfish around and are laughing and making jokes, she feels a deep sadness for these people too. Yet another puffer floats by, its spines and fragile body blown out in defence against something that none of us are truly safe from.

She closes her eyes and tries to find hope.

…

People, thousands of them rushing through the station. Each with their own thoughts, their own plans. Each of them avoiding all the others so they won’t crash or commit some sin. Each of them protecting their little bit of space they carry around with them as they run from cash machine to ticket machine from coffee machine to cash machine and back again. Each expecting something of all the others, a way of behaving, a code of conduct, unspoken, yet always assumed and present in the fictions of each and everyone. Some rush along in the moment enjoying the smells of coffee and complicated perfume and the bright sky blue on the dress of that woman in the killer heels in the corner staring hopelessly at the timetable while her kids run havoc with icecream. Some are anywhere but this ugly, cold train station and plan tonight’s romantic dinner with the wife, calculate work expenses and tax returns or rerun the argument from last night over and over again, hands numbly buying a newspaper, any old flowers, a bottle of water, bodies present but minds a hundred miles away.

People disappoint us, there’s no way around it. We expect things that we can’t hope to see fulfilled. We believe, for some reason, that what we do and how we treat people will be returned to us in kind. It’s a fiction, the worst kind of fantasy that can only lead to failure. People shouldbehave a certain way, they must treat us in a certain way, because how could they not? Anything else causes us to lose our hold on life, our illusion of control slips through our fingers. And rain falls when we crave the sun.

People rush on. Sometimes they collide. For a few brief moments there’s engagement. There’s anger, there’s warmth, there are stories untold, possibilities that spin off into a future unwritten. Until a whistle blows and life moves on. Life always moves on, and each continues alone. These brief moments of chaotic collision bring light and sparks and the strangest of sounds, but ultimately times moves on. Each gets on their train, with their memories, with their plans for future engagements. The moment is with each of them once again in the feel of the worn fabric of the seat under tired fingers, the light refracted a thousand times through safety windows as sun peeks through eternal clouds for just a moment. In the heaviness of boots under a table out of sight but still full of the power endowed to them.

Because if we hold on so tightly to the way things should be, rather than the way they are we create a world which always falls short. People will always be something other than what we hope they will be. Our expectations never match reality as closely as we believe would make us happy. And the harder we hold on, the faster we lose our grip. Our solid hopes turned to sand. Life turns on leaving us behind holding on to nothing but air. And the sun comes and goes without us even looking up.

Scenery flashes by and imagination dances across the window. Conversations which haven’t happened yet, and possibly never will. Internal conversations being had by other people in silence as they stare out of other windows miles away – a privacy too intimate, and too far away to be true. Future events that need to be prepared for, our lines practised and rehearsed, so that everything can be just so. The opinions of others that become more harmful the stronger we imagine them. Glances from other passengers which explode into insecurity. Conversations in unknown languages which become all about everything we fear. And the occasional deep breath. Feet shifting in trainers feeling the warmth of expensive socks, a familiar t-shirt stretched over unfamiliar muscles, the impossibly tiny details of the back of a hand which will never be seen again in this lifetime. A thousand details drank in, a universe of colours we could never imagine but which lie within sight at any given time. A palette of emotions, pure and blended and splashed about in a moment of childish spontaneity. A deep breath and a tiny, tiny sob, unheard but felt from the very depths. Because this is the purest moment.

…

Lying there, in a position most vulnerable. The symbol of vulnerability. Making the right noises at the right time, radiating false complicity. Unquestioning hands grab hair and push their face into the pillow. Unquestioning hips grind into their ass and hold them down against the bed. No, they don’t say no. That’s true. They could say it, their mouth is not so far pushed into the pillow that they couldn’t pronounce the word. But they don’t say it. They radiate false complicity and make sounds most unconvincing.

Like work they think. I should get money for this. But in work, it would never have gotten this far.

And so far out of their body which is being ground and pulled and bitten hard, hard their mind flashes back to another time they didn’t say no. An ex lover who couldn’t get that over was over and took frozen silence for complicity. Only that was just gentle ass rubbing. This is full on violence compared to that. This person is treating me like the whore they think I am they think to themselves, as another bite finds another nerve. This is a porn fantasy they’re having with the kind of porn actor they think I am they think, as they’re ground further into the dusty mattress.

In a different context this would be wonderful, giving limited power and trust to someone who’s earned it. Opening themselves to plays of power and trust and pain. But this person hasn’t asked. Doesn’t care. And hasn’t earned it. Yet still they don’t say no. They radiate false complicity.

The enamel safety of the bathroom for a while and realising finally that this is all wrong they get enough self respect together to try to explain and start to leave. Whatever, whatever, whatever is the literal answer. You didn’t say no, so you wanted it. This is your fault, explain why you’re upset. Tell me everything. You can’t just leave. Let me grab your heart and bite your memories and grind your traumas. You owe me everything.

This is your fault.

And it works, the guilt internalised and taken to the uncaring street. Maybe this was my fault they think, their mind racing as they get on a bus full of strangers. Why didn’t I get out earlier? Why did I miss the signs? What do I do that people hate me like this? It can’t be that everyone is such an asshole. I’m the common element. I didn’t say no. This is my fault.

And at the other end of a long bus journey a best friend with a hug and tea and endless spaghetti and patience listens and listens and listens and listens and finally produces the ‘stop’ that should have slipped past lips hours ago. This is not your fault the friend says. So, so many people really are assholes, that’s how society makes them. This is not your fault says the friend firmly and forever.

This is not your fault.