I was born in Halifax, Yorkshire in 1957 and the world I was born into was still in post war mode, not yet shifting up a gear that it did once the sixties kicked in. Whilst I've not lived in Halifax since 1969, I would still say that is where I am from. Even though I've lived the majority of my adult life in the south of England. This has not changed my sense of being from the north, even though the vestiges of my Yorkshire accent are a trifle thin and vowel sounds only these days. I've lived longer in East Anglia, my adopted home, than anywhere else. Though it will never be where I am from.
When my family moved from Halifax I was on the cusp of my teenage years. Already recognising the early hints of my sexual orientation awakening. I did not initially know then what to call that. When I did come across the word homosexual, I had to look up a dictionary explanation. I recognised that this bald definition was meant to describe me, but at the same time it didn't. For in my experience a homosexual was Larry Grayson or John Inman, which I did not feel I was at all like. This was only a few years after homosexuality was decriminalised. The prejudices in my village had not yet caught up, in fact the entire country hadn't. A homosexual was still viewed as an intrinsically bad person, which I knew I simply was not.
From the moment we are born emotional impressions of ourselves and the world that surrounds us are formed. And those impressions are never really erased, providing the nascent template from which everything we subsequently encounter is interpreted. Spending the rest of our lives trying to understand, unpick, better manage or get around these habitual reactions to ourselves and the world. And you know some days this can be a job of work for me and on others I don't buy into it at all. Everything can all feel too hardwired to change.
This self biased history of me and my experience exists whether I like it or not. Forming the raw unruly foundation for who I currently am. A strange mix of impressions and aspirations some from myself, some from my parents and society. Disquietingly, as I grow older I find recognisibly parental views and habits now seeping embarrassingly into my language and behaviour. Much as I might want to see myself as not being like that, there it is.
You cannot totally erase your personal history however you have experienced it, whether negatively or positively. It nevertheless played its part in forming you. One might wish to retrospectively rewrite it with better outcomes and snappier repartee. Memories being largely emotionally based, this makes the details of your life as remembered rarely how it actually was. Our past, however partial and uncomfortable to recollect, remains influential upon who you are now, and what you will become. To paraphrase the psychologist James Hillman - even through our childhood traumas and difficulties something fundamental to us is struggling to get out and be made manifest. From something soured a thing of altogether sweeter beauty may emerge.
If you do uncover and manifest the personal truth of who you really are, you can never unlearn that. My biology and gender at birth and my personal history have remained the same, because I never required them to change. The repercussions of realising I was gay, however, did profoundly affect my aspirations for myself. I clocked early on the path my life would now take. It was unlikely to be a conventional one. It wouldn't involve bringing up children. I never envisaged then that I'd ever be married to a man I loved. I emotionally signed off from a lot, and filed them under The Things That Will Not Now Happen. Whatever my life was going to be about, if it wasn't going to be a house, a wife and 2.4 children, puzzled me for some time. Until I became a Buddhist. But that's a whole other story of truth and transformation..
I would imagine that at some point if you are trans, your biology and personal history would dramatically diverge from personal truth. Things no longer feeling like they are traveling together in the same direction, if they ever were. Progressing down the path of transition, the focus maybe on the personal truth of who you feel yourself to really be, and making that a lived reality. I can understand why one might want to leave behind, rewrite or ignore ones personal history, even ones essential biology. But despite the fundamentals of surgery and the effects of medication, the basic body being transformed will remain the male or a female one you were born with. Whatever the person you create from it, its previous history is preserved in its bones and muscles. This cannot be imaginatively wished away, or brushed under the carpet, however much one might feel you want it to be gone, and gone for good. There is a uniqueness inherent to being a trans woman or man, and its in the alchemy born from an imaginative transformation, and the perspective this brings to a life. It is rare that people are born this way, they have the full and lived knowledge of being self created.
At some point though, there is a peace to be made with the person they were born as, and that early history in the wrong gender they've fought to make right. Personal truth is unable to revise all of that, but maybe to transcend it is now feasible. The journey a transcending person takes to living as the gender of their desire, is different to that of a person born into that gender. Its a radically different form of femininity or masculinity being given form here. As I've said before, Feelings, not facts, require finding modes of expression. Its exemplified by the plethora of pronouns and specificly invented names to describe one persons individual sense of themselves. This is not unique to trans, but a manifestation of a much broader trend in our culture , paraded on Instagram and its like, of a self preoccupied narcissistic individualism. In love with a selfie. To make ourselves unique and special.
There were times when I wanted to put my own Yorkshire upbringing behind me. Not denying it, but it felt limiting, so I wanted to go beyond it. I could find myself forever internally grumbling about the 'professional ' northerner, living in the south, but laying the accent on thick for their television and radio appearances etc etc. It became for a while a personal bete noire, something I did not want to be.
To be honest, I have come a long way from my northern origins. A lot of that was deliberate on my part. I needed to create space in which to discover who I was, and how I was going to live life as a gay man. So there was a career move to London. There is often a need to put distance between ones personal history, in pursuit of personal truth. I don't want to forget my origins. Having moved about a bit, since 1981 I've lived in London, Diss, Ipswich, Cambridge and now Sheringham, I can see that maybe this sketches a picture of a lifetime spent in search of a new home for myself. And that would not be far wrong.
We were on holiday in Malton in North Yorkshire, a few years ago. Right in the heart of what many Yorkshiremen proudly boast is 'God's Own Country'. I cannot stand the conceited arrogance of this phrase. Don't get me wrong, I love the Yorkshire countryside and coast dearly. But I don't need it to give it the stamp and approval of a deity. There's a lot about the Yorkshire countryside that evokes childhood memories of Halifax. It feels like home ground, even though I left this for good when I was eleven. I find myself resisting the cultivation of any type of sentimental mythology around my Yorkshireness. And I find its the same with my gayness too.
Perhaps one always has mixed feelings about where we have come from. Linked in, as it often is, with uncomfortable memories of that unformed naive gaucheness which was your younger self. Someone we dearly hope we've grown out of being. Like an unfortunate friend you no longer wish to acknowledge having known. And it maybe that one's personal history never sits easy with the aspirations inherent to the pursuit of one's personal truth, of whatever it is you wanted to be. On the other hand, maybe there is something lurking behind my Yorkshire upbringing, or something in who I like to believe I am now, that I don't want to fully acknowledge, that I find hard to transcend the need for.
No comments:
Post a Comment