To thine own self...

Strings photo strings.jpgI've trundled out my joining tools again. This particular chapter consists of one portion of a diary from early March of 2011...and excerpts from my performance piece, Crossing the Gender Line, which I presented several times at academic venues in Arkansas and also was invited to perform at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL in February, 1995. I can date the various performances by examining the poems included...it was my habit to write a new one for each performance. The excerpts are from the piece as it stood in 1998.

The graphic is entitled Strings. I hope this hits the right notes.

Scarlet Letter   

I was very far away. My real life had gone underground and could not be seen by anybody. The person at the surface that everybody saw was no longer me. 

--Philip Ó Ceallaigh

 

I became a teacher in 1977, when I was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Oregon. I spent five years there earning my PhD before moving on to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee for three years, during which time both my parents died. That sort of put the kibosh on me getting enough done to earn tenure there…and my mentor (E. H. Feller) died as well…so I moved on to the University of Central Arkansas, where I taught for 16 years.

It was while I was at UCA that I transitioned, halfway through my time there. If I do say so myself, I was a damn good teacher during that time…and transitioning didn't change that. But it became apparent to me that my vocation had changed a bit. I mean, I was going to remain a teacher. There was no doubt about that. "Teacher" was my number one descriptor. But no longer would I have a full-time commitment to teaching mathematics. I would have to engage the more difficult task of teaching people about gender variance. If the world was going to change sufficiently to embrace people like me as viable human beings, I was going to have to accept the mission of teaching the people in that world about who we were and display that we were deserving of respect and equal treatment. If not me, who? If not now, when?

And that's what I have spent my life doing ever since.

In 2000 I moved on to New Jersey in hopes of finding a better climate and am now in my 11th year at Bloomfield College, located a little north of Newark. And my teaching about gender and people like me is now conducted online…mostly in this place.

So I've taught about who we are, what it means to be one of us, and how we are mistreated, discriminated against, and/or disrespected. A question will therefore come to some people's mind is, given that we are aware of how we will be viewed and interacted with, why do we go through this?

Shakespeare said it best, I think…with Polonius delivering his words to Laertes in Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

Crossing the Gender Line

Good Afternoon.

My name is Robyn Elaine Serven.

If I were forced to choose one phrase that most describes me, I would choose "mathematics professor." I "profess" mathematics very well. Students line up to enroll in my classes because I am the best math teacher on my campus. This is part of me, the major part of who I am, but it is not what interests most people.

I used to be a hippie...yep, lived in the Haight, as we called it, in San Francisco in the late '60s. I was there a long time emotionally and psychologically. Chronologically, it was only about 14 months...and I wasn't always in the Haight physically, but I was mentally. People who were there at the time probably know what I am trying to say here. Poor People's March on Washington/Resurrection City, a month or so in Mexico, a few weeks in the East Village, several times back and forth across the country by thumb. Maybe this defined me for a long period of my life.

I am also a lover of music. My favorite band was an early '70s rock band from England called Curved Air. The band members were students of classical music in London. I tend to like songs which have very poetic lyrics: Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Wilson Phillips, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Ferron, Leonard Cohen, Sara McLachlan. While perhaps interesting, this
doesn't define me either.

basketball photo basketball.jpgI played basketball and baseball when I was young. I was a capable center (at 6'3") in high school...defensive specialist, mostly, though I once scored 23 points in a game. In baseball I played third base, later shortstop, and did some pitching. I once pitched a no-hitter in junior high. In high school I was the main relief pitcher, though I wasn't used as much as I would have liked. I didn't allow any earned runs my senior year and batted .306 as mostly a pinch hitter. I was a switch hitter... perhaps a portent of things to come?

I collect trivia...I imagine I would do very well on Jeopardy given the right categories. Like anything about old movies. I'm a real connoisseur. My favorites change from time to time, but some of them are: Sweet Charity, Bells Are Ringing, My Man Godfrey (the William Powell version, not the one with David Niven), any Thin Man movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, Irma La Douce, Key Largo and The Petrified Forest. I guess that's not what interests people about me at present either.

I'm a poet and a writer. I have been for the past five and a half years or so. It's something that has bloomed as I became myself. You get to hear some of it tonight, sprinkled here and there at hopefully appropriate places. [Mostly omitted here for the sake of shortening--Ed]

"Became myself?" I hear you ask? I'm a transsexual woman. Note that the noun is "woman." "Transsexual" is an adjective (though from time to time I will probably use it as a noun tonight in the interest of brevity). Where I live, this part of me, being "transsexual," has dominated my definition. I consider it only to be another facet...it makes me "different," but we are all "different" in some way.

I tried to fight being transsexual for a lot of years. Denial never worked. I knew. I can't deny what I know is true. Trying to ignore it was what I did for most of my life. It didn't work in the end. But my "being transsexual" interests people. So I guess that's what I'll talk about tonight.

The first poem is called "Unfinished Woman."



Incompletion
Unfinished Woman

Some assembly required.
Includes non-factory installed equipment.
Read instructions completely before beginning.
Mistakes are not correctable.
Insert tab A into slot B.
Batteries are not included.

--Robyn Elaine Serven
--June, 1993

The title of the poem was from an email .sig one of my transsexual friends used to use. A shout-out to you, Allison, wherever you may be.

What does it mean to be transsexual? For one thing, I was diagnosed or diagnosed myself, it doesn't matter to me which way you look at it, as having "gender dysphoria." Gender dysphoria is defined as the state of being uncomfortable with one's gender. Not all gender dysphorics are transsexual. For a transsexual person this discomfort is most often severe. For a transsexual person there are really only two choices and one of them doesn't work very well: deny who you are or do something about it. Like I said, denial never worked for me.

In our society, gender at birth is determined by someone who looks at the genitals of the baby and makes a determination. I don't know about you, but my genitals are *not* the location of my identity. My identity is located in my mind, in my soul, and in my heart. My genitals only determine my sex. To transfolk the distinction between gender and sex is of paramount importance.

There have been other possible methods of determining gender put forth, but they all suffer from the same deficiency: they assume that sex=gender. For the vast majority of humans, this may be so, or at least their gender and sex are congruent. But for a minority of us, perhaps as many as 4% of the population, the distinction is all too noticeable...one estimate is that there are 60,000 transsexuals and intersex (formerly called hermaphrodites) in the United States alone: that is, approximately ten in every 45,000 people. Three of those ten will never do anything about their condition except suffer a life of more or less constant depression. Another 25-30% will commit suicide. And 30% more will live somewhere between the genders. Ten to fifteen percent will have surgery to "cross the gender line."

Not all gender-variant people are the same. Just like all humans there is variation among us. My story is not typical, although it probably has similarities with the stories of many transsexual people.

A child in our society doesn't have much of on opportunity to tell anyone about his/her being transsexual. Before the child has the vocabulary or knowledge to address the problem, it is made clear in our culture that mistakes are indeed not correctable in the matter of gender assignment. A young "boy" who is really a girl, a young "girl" that is really a boy, or a child that is both or neither, learns early on that it is not appropriate and that it should be kept a secret. Most transsexuals are very much aware of their condition and their plight at a very early age. But most often there is nowhere to turn for help or understanding. What we learn instead is to be ashamed of and to feel guilty about who we are.

Circumstances in my own life led me to finally tell my mother when I was 11, between 6 and 7 years after I knew I had a problem and about 4 years after I knew exactly what it was. She had no tools to cope with this, so she denied it was so... essentially denying me the right to be myself. For a lot of years, I held that against her...until I came to realize that people who aren't transsexual really don't have the ability to understand something that to them is a "non-feeling." For the next 32 years, as a consequence of our conversation, I lived a lie, but one that was considered "socially acceptable." During this time, I was on the verge of suicide at least 4 times, but I guess I am a survivor because I either stopped at the last moment or something happened to stop me.

...[Poetry elided]

When I was 20, having lived as a hippie for two years and failed at a suicide attempt number two the week before, I met the woman who was to become my wife. I did not tell her about myself. She was attracted to me, seemed to care about me. She introduced me to sex, and became pregnant, so I married her and took on the roles of husband and father. I did not have the tools for these roles, but I tried. My biggest regret in life is that I had not been honest with about myself with her. But I don't regret having been married or having lived what most people would have considered a "normal" gender existence for all those years. Those years helped to mold who I am now. And without having been married, I would have missed having the wonderful lesbian daughter that I have.

About 5 years after our marriage, while back in college for another try and after two years as a correctional specialist in the Army (the worst two years of my life), I began having more problems with my dysphoria. The "real me," the person who dwelt only in my head at the time, was having strong conflicts with the outward persona I adopted in order to deal with the rest of the world. Suicide attempt number three was sidetracked because my daughter would have been the one to discover my body and I couldn't do that to her.

This conflict lasted for the next 18 years, until I couldn't stand it any more. I resolved to end it all. I sat staring at a butcher knife for several hours, afraid to actually do it, but more afraid not to. I forced myself to take a walk. On the walk, it became so clear to me. I had three choices:

(1) go on with my life as I had been (which I had already determined I could not do)

(2) end my life (a permanent solution to my problem)

(3) be myself...the "me" I knew I really was (totally scary)

...[Poetry elided]

In the fall of 1992, the "world" learned about me. I had to inform my employers about the changes I would be going through, of course, and one of my colleagues felt the community in which we lived should know as well and outed me to the local newspaper. The story was picked up by the Associated Press and spread to at least five states and was splattered all over television and radio in Arkansas.

The state that we call Transition was not easy. I was fortunate to have tenure. Many transfolk are fired or forced to resign from their jobs, or choose to resign because they believe that facing their former coworkers would be too difficult for them. Most transpeople who are married see their spouses depart, usually accompanied by any small children, sometimes even large ones. Some even lose their parents. Most transfolk lose most of their friends. I believe, though some gender-variant people disagree with me, that it is fortunate that we are required to be in therapy, or I fear the suicide rate would be higher than it already is.

I started living openly as a woman, or is that openly as transsexual, for some didn't then and some still don't accept me as a woman, on September 30, 1992. With the approval of my therapist and under the supervision of my doctor, I started taking an anti-androgen to block the testosterone that I felt had for years poisoned my body and estrogens to change my body into what I felt it should have been. The changes in my body have been slow but steady, and here I am. On August 9th, 1994, I had genital alteration surgery, sex-reassignment surgery, gender confirmation surgery, a sex change, or whatever you would like to call it. On March 21, 1995, I had a second surgery to
finish the process.

..[Poetry elided]

Changing sex is expensive. We scrimp and save trying to pay for the over $5000 necessary for medical, psychological, and pharmaceutical bills per year, knowing that we also need to raise about $10,000 more for the surgery, because most insurance companies refuse to cover this condition. The surgery is not an easy thing to go through. It is painful. Recovery is a very long process. There is no certainty that it ultimately with be totally successful. We hope for the best, while realizing that we will be lucky if we get full function.

..[Poetry elided]

We stand in the face of a society that judges us in the same breath with child molesters as perverts, that laughs at us on television, that calls us names or even physically assaults us in person (or worse, we are all too frequently murdered because of who we are)...that ostracizes us socially and economically...all because we are different...all because we choose life over death.

I'm not really bitter often. I have periods of it, as well as periods of depression, as you may be able to tell from the other poems you have heard so far, but please try to understand...I tend to write more often when I am depressed. When I am feeling good, I'm too busy out enjoying life.

I'm really an incurable optimist. I'm happier than I have ever been before, even on my bad days. I love experiencing life from my new perspective. Life is fabulous in its intricacy. Learning about it, even at the age of 49, almost 50, is a wonderful gift. I celebrate the diversity of the human condition.

I'll end with the poem written for the Northwestern performance:



Question
  
The Questions

When people ask me
"Who are you?"
I answer honestly
"I am me."

When they ask
"What are you?"
I say "An individual, one,
And I am whole."

When I'm asked
"Which are you?"
I know that others decide
that for themselves.

When I hear
"Why are you?"
The why is not important
"Because I am."

--Robyn Elaine Serven
--February, 1995

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I dug deep for this one...

Robyn's picture

..,even daring to find a photo of me from the way, way back..knowing that there are some people who will never see me in the same way as I appear now once they have seen it.

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