Parenting

When I eventually got round to looking through all my social media earlier today I was slightly perturbed by all the Mothers Day stuff I saw my friends posting. Being slightly dull it took me a while to realise that much of the World fail to celebrate this event on the right day (6th March this year) preferring to wait a couple of months, presumably for better weather.

Still seeing all this put me in mind of my own family and our relationships.   Becoming a parent changed everything for me, I have already observed that it was becoming a parent that made me a feminist, it changed my attitude to work (I changed job simply so that I could be at home every evening), amongst all the other things I think it also changed the way I thought about my own parents, appreciating what they went through with us.   My relationship with my Mother is now so clouded by her illness that I sometimes have to make an effort to remember her as the woman she was, but I was also conscious that I did not want to repeat the mistakes that my parents made.

Like most parents I failed! I failed to avid the mistakes of previous generations, I failed to be perfect, but then so do we all, I think the trick is in how we come to terms with our imperfection.   In the end I realised that my daughter is an intelligent, talented and beautiful person in her own right and I need to treat her as such, with honesty and consideration and love. I cherish the time we spend together, I love to get her text messages, and feel privileged to be her facebook friend.

While I am sure that I allow her to win any "Who's got the weirdest Dad" competitions with her friends I feel so pleased that she still wants to spend time with me and calls me Dad.

Even though (or maybe because) I have engaged in this weird process of transition I am more than aware that the roles of Mum and Dad are not interchangeable.   I am not talking about the actual process of pregnancy and giving birth, although that must be special, as I know of many wonderful Mothers who have been denied that privilege. For most of us Mother is the person who nurtures and cares for us, who is around when needed, who gives us food and provides clean clothing, the person we go to for hugs and comfort. Dads are different, Dads provide, Dads protect, Dads tell bad jokes and are allowed to be silly, often they also have to be the bad guy who says no, Both Mums and Dads provide role models.

This is very simplistic approach, and not based entirely on my own experience, my Dad taught me how to be a man, I think he did a pretty good job since I fooled a lot of people, including me, for a long time. I can't say my Mother taught me how to be a woman, after all I am still learning.

Whatever, I am proud when my Daughter calls me Dad.

We're not going Back!

Like so many of us in our little community I am much saddened by the way some American States appear to be trying to legislate us away.   I am sure that this is based on the idea that by attacking a mostly quite secretive group they are in effect attacking the entire liberal side of the US. Through these hate filled laws they think they are promoting Christian, conservative, American values, that can of course only be true if they are thinking of the American values that gave them the Klu Klux Klan, Slavery, Racial Segregation, and armed vigilantes, there is certainly nothing Christian about promoting hate and fear.   To me those who promote these laws are no more Christian than I.S. is Islamic.

I am glad to see that the bigots are not getting it all their own way and that corporate America as well as natural liberal allies are fighting back. I particularly liked Hannah's reaction, reproduced here!

Not on my own

On occasion I find that I am challenged as to how I can maintain my Christian Faith, while also identifying as transgender, well, I will admit that over the years I have had quite a struggle with this one. I know that for many people the two simply do not seem compatible and I fully expect that people will continue to be challenge me on this, and I do not have a problem with that.

I believe in a God who is transformational, a God who heals, a God who cares passionately for each and every one of us, a God who knows my name, and has chosen me as his adopted child, A God who is developing and molding me into a closer likeness to himself; now why would he care what I wear?   But of course it is much more complicated than that!

We often confuse what we hear from the pulpit, or indeed read in our newspapers and pick up from society with what is actually in scripture, there is only one verse (Deuteronomy 22:5) in the whole of the Bible that appears to concern crossdressing, but it is very specifically about crossdressing, even if the Rabbinic writings suggest that it is primarily concerned with either religious practise and / or military service, however there is a popular view that having a divergent gender identity is unchristian.

We see the outworking of that attitude in the USA at the moment as more and more laws are being put through legislatures under the guise of religious freedom, that are in fact attacking transgender people, preventing them from going about their daily lives with the protection of law.

For most of my life I bought into the popular idea that crossdressing, transvestism, and transgender were more or less the same thing and all equally evil! So when I became a Christian I very much saw my Crossdressing as something that I needed to be cured of.   I struggled and I prayed, I struggled and endured, and I continued to pray; yet this thing was not taken away from me, maybe like Paul I had to endure this "thorn in my flesh", but God had cured me in other ways so why not this?

I know God wants the best for me, because he told me so. he has plans for me, and those plans are good! I have written elsewhere on this Blog about my own personal journey from cross dresser to Trans Woman, but not so much the part that my faith played in first preventing it, and then in facilitating it.

It was after a series of intensive prayer meetings with a couple of ladies that I came to the conclusion that God loves me, forgives me and wants to heal me.  These two good ladies came to the same conclusion, they just expected God to heal me in a different way, the way I had previously been expecting and the way my prayers had been anticipating. God wanted me to live a full, loving and homogeneous life, free of the gender confusion that I was enduring, I had been expecting God to heal me by making me a normal Cisgendered man,instead he choose that I should become the woman he had always meant me to be. I was born into an imperfect world, and that led to me being born this way, just like any other congenital condition, it was not God's plan that I was born this way, but he does want me to be whole, and healed, I had to embrace who and what I am, and live the life I had been given to the full.

It is only through God's healing power that I am where I am now, it is only through the knowledge of his unconditional love that I have been able to engage in this process of transition.   I wonder how much, and how often we limit God's healing when we try to impose on him how we think he should heal us?

Not That Interesting, and definitely not interested!

It may just be that being trans is my new normal, it may be that because I have been presenting female full time for well over a year now, it may be because it is over a year since I legally changed my name, or it may be that it really is the case; BUT, I have come to the conclusion that being trans is not the most interesting thing about me!

The other evening after a concert I was in a pub in central London with several score other people, and there were four times as many Trans Women there as Tuba players!   As I was driving around yesterday I saw at least four people that I don't know that I would identify as trans, I meet others when I am out shopping, at the bank, and every other aspect of my day to day life. Statistics vary from 1% to 0.3% of the general population being trans to some extent or another, I wonder how that compares to the proportion of Orchestral Bass Trombones?

I live a very busy life, running my own little gardening business, and as part of a number of musical groups, I am a Church member and part of the RSCM and the RHS. I am a Chartered Waste Manager, I have a Mother who is an artist and a daughter who is a songwriter, I have broken six vertebrae and am still standing, I have ridden motorbikes across Europe and owned classic cars.

I have played Music at the Albert Hall and the Festival hall, I have played Rugby at a half decent level, and taken part in political campaigns, yet people still seem to be more interested in the length of my skirts!

I will admit that it can be nice to be noticed, and that it is rather fun to an object of desire, but, please don't assume that just because I am transgender I want to have a sexual encounter with any bloke who asks, especially if you can't even manage to ask nicely!

I have a wealth of experiences, skills, maybe even some talent. I have a mind, I am a published journalist (though not recently) and have a pretty wide range of interests.

What of all of this makes a man I don't even know, feel entitled to expect that I would want to engage in acts of oral sex with him?

Typical

A typical Sax Player

The other day I was having a conversation with the Sax player with the Jazz Band I play in, he commented something like, "Now that's my idea of what a Bass Player looks like". At the time I didn't really think about it, but it made me wonder how we get our ideas of how different instrumentalists should look.   Sure some will come from people we know, but others may be from early images we take in.

For many of us those images will be from the Muppets band.
Personally I think these characters were inspired, as they capture so much of the stereotypes of the instrumentalists. I am sure that most of will remember Animal on the drums, Rolf the piano playing dog, Zoot the cool dude on sax and of course the band leader Dr Teeth, but who was the bass player?

Well he was Floyd Pepper the cool guy with the whiskers, Janice played Guitar and sang a bit too.

Suzi!!!!

But I can think of other early images of Bass players, and I'm not at all sure where my image fits in

Emma Hughes, brilliant young bass player, I think I may have played with her at WOW last year

.

Can I stop now please?

Recently I have been engaged on a strange pursuit, I have been trying to prove Murphy's Law, for those few of you not in the know, it's Murphy's Law that states "a dropped slice of toast will always land butter side down," or if you prefer "if it can go wrong, it will".

Over the last couple of weeks I have

• Travelled to and from Cardiff to allow my Mother to be discharged from Hospital, to find that she has been admitted a couple of days later.
•  Lost my Van keys, in a customers garden, meaning a cab back home to collect the spares and then back to the customers again.
• Had Bailiffs chasing me for Council Tax that was actually owed by somebody else on a different flat.
• Had my van driven into at a road junction, the car then driving off with lights out so I couldn't even get their number.
• Had my Broadband go down.
• Had my landline go down (still not fixed)
• Had the Fire Brigade break into my flat causing major damage to the front door (I had accidently left on an electric ring on my hob which set off the alarms)

All in all it has meant that the Blog has not been a top priority, and at times I not felt very cherished.    I have got into a frame of mind where I am constantly thinking about what is going to go wrong next, which I suspect would almost cause something.

A couple of men staying in a bed and breakfast meet over breakfast, one asks how the other slept? he say fine, he got in a little and started to get undressed, had dropped one of his boots on the floor, then realised it must have sounded quite loud so was very careful after that to be quite in case he disturbed anyone else's sleep. How did his breakfast partner sleep, Terribly, "I was awake all night waiting for the other boot to drop!"

I am currently waiting for the other boot to drop!

I'm a fundamentalist

The Church of England official prayer for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (last Sunday the 17th April) was

"Risen Christ, faithful shepherd of your Father's sheep; teach us to hear your voice and to follow your command, that all your people may be gathered into one flock, to the glory of God the Father. Amen"

Of course as a Christian I agree with this wholeheartedly, it struck a particular resonance last week as on the previous day I had attended a meeting of the 2:23 group (Named for Hosea 2:23 as quoted in Romans 9:25 "I will call them 'my people' who are not my people; and I will call her 'loved one' who is not my loved one"). This is a a network of Christians, connected by LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues, who have discovered that God loves us just as they are. They seek to support, Christian families and friends of LGBT people, as well as those directly affected themselves. This is the second of their meetings I have been to, and I find them welcoming, genuine spirit filled people, and blessedly one of those wonderful LGBT groups that fully includes the T.

Sometimes it feels as though the Church is splitting more and more rather than coming closer together, sometimes this is portrayed as a North / South Split, sometimes as a Black / White split and most often as Liberal / Conservative split. I rather suspect that if we were all open to the Holy Spirit and truly listened to what he is telling us, rather than assuming we know what God thinks, then we would be modeling Christ's love rather than displaying the World's hate.

I come from a Charismatic Evangelical background, but am not exclusive, in conversation one day with a good friend who is an Anglo-Catholic we decided that although we come from teh opposite wings of the Church of England we were both fundamentalists! Since the fundamental of Christ's teaching is love, we have to embrace love, for all, in everything we do.

I worry that so much of what I see being done in the name of Christianity seems to based on hate and intolerance, yet I choose to continue to display love where I can, and to pray for those whose views I oppose. I mourn the fact that although I am shown love and acceptance in many areas of the Church, there are some of the people who I should have most expected to display Christ's love who are causing me the most hurt. I cannot leave this and walk away, I cannot forgive and forget, I am trying hard to find forgiveness in my heart, but I also remember what Jesus said in: Matt 5:23-24 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”

I feel that this makes it incumbent on us to reconcile ourselves with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We cannot simply agree to differ, We cannot go our separate ways and pretend they do not exist, At the very least we need to strive to understand, empathise and ultimately to agree. I will not pretend that this will be easy, or will happen any time soon but we should be trying

Frustration!!!!!

I have been getting increasingly frustrated over the last week or so, my telephone has developed an intermittent problem, which is off course also having an impact on my internet access. It has begun to feel as though every time I start doing anything the line goes dead and I lose everything I have been doing.   I know that this is probably not the case, but as I have had very few opportunities to get on here to lose those occasions when I have had the opportunity is very frustrating.

I have also had a couple of very unpleasant telephone conversations where the functionary at the other end has insisted on misgendering me, even after being corrected. I have now had to go so far as to issue a formal complaint against one of these callers; I await the outcome with "interest"!

On the other hand we have had some nice weather over the last couple of weeks and I have been able to get some good work done, last week I actually managed a five day week for the first time this year.   Indeed there have been several days when I have been stripped down to my tee shirt, I have even been considering getting my shorts out.   Just as well I didn't today as it rained most of the day!   I have had to replace some of my gardening machinery, a mower and a strimmer, the mower was on it's last legs, but I do get so annoyed that strimmers generally seem to be considered as disposable.   I can't find anyone to service a standard machine, so have finally caved in and bought an expensive professional machine in teh hope that it will last me more than a single season.

Well between trips to Cardiff, loads of rehearsals and meetings I have had very few opportunities to get on to my blog, or indeed anyone else's.

I shall try to catch up a bit over the next week, in the meantime here's a pretty picture of one of my gardens.

WOW!!!!

For the last few years I have been saying that the coolest thing I have ever done, was to play in the backing band for my daughter, it was at a Church Social and she was singing a couple of Amy Winehouse numbers,  "Back to Black", and "Rehab". The other day I had to admit to her that she had been superseded.   Last month I found myself on a Sunday evening sitting in the World's only all female orchestra playing the accompaniment to "We are Family" with Sister Sledge! That has just got to be the coolest thing any Tuba player can ever do.

I have only just discovered that one of the other members of the brass section has her own blog and wrote a very good piece about the event so rather than go over everything that she said I will just send you over to Lauren's blog for all the details.

Brass Section Rehearsal

I will try to content myself just a few quick observations,

• Everyone I met, in the orchestra, soloists, guests, organisers, even the conductors were very friendly and approachable, and there to enjoy themselves.
• The musicianship of the orchestra was outstanding, for a scratch orchestra made up of a few pros, students and rank amateurs like me to get together some pretty challenging music with very little rehearsal was outstanding, to then have to transpose a whole piece at sight showed just what a quality outfit this really is.
• To an old lag like me it was very encouraging to not only see so many talented women gathered together, but even better that so many are young.  I was certainly the oldest in the Brass section by a good couple of decades!
• All of the "Stars" Sandy Toksvig, Sue Perkins, Sister Sledge Bonnie Langford and Sara Pascoe, all came across as very genuine and are exactly like they seem when you see them on the telly!
• I do hope so much that I will be able to be part of this again next year

The Young, Talented and Beautiful Brass Section (plus me) waiting to go on stage

I Know, I Know

I have been highly remiss and neglectful of you all with my shameful lack of posting here.  It's not that I don't love you it's just that there always seems to be something else claiming my time and attention.   Of course sometimes that will just be some rubbish television and a glass of wine after a hard day's work.   And, it's not just this blog that's been suffering even my work is behind, what with a combination of mechanical failures and emergency storm damage repairs I have had plenty to do, if not a great deal of will to do it.  

So, I still plan to  manage a post or two on my experiences last month at the Festival Hall, and I have all sorts of garden related observations, and maybe even a comment or two about the just passed Transgender Day of Visibility. For now I will just observe that I was visible.

As I get on with life I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that being Trans is actually one of the more normal things about me.   I am told that I am "so brave" to do transition, or that it must have been "so difficult" growing up.   I don't know about any of that, it's just my life and that's how it's gone.

When we grow up we assume that we are normal, and that we are experiencing the same things as everybody else.   Looking back I now understand that I had quite a comfortable childhood, but none the less one with little in the way of affection. I knew I was loved and cared for and just thought that I and my family were the same as all others.   As we grow up and get to know other people and understand their situations we begin to understand our own better.   Because no one else seemed to have any gender based problems it was only then that I began to think that maybe this wasn't normal, and that maybe I shouldn't talk about it.

These days with the internet and our increased interconnectedness we not only hear about the high profile transitions of Caitlin Jenner, Kelly Maloney and the like, we can also join fora and visit websites, read blogs, and find support groups.   Once again I am beginning to find that my new normal, may be fairly normal after all.

Perhaps there really are more interesting things about me, I have found that a good way of getting attention in a conversation with the line "After I broke my neck", or  "Well of course that was the third time I nearly died", I also suspect that there may be more trans women around than orchestral Bass Trombone players.   Maybe it's time that I write less about what I wear and a bit more about what I plant, and where I play.