Mind the Gap

“You’re in the gap,” observed my supervisor, calmly commenting on the difficulties I had expressed about being in a period of transition.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m in the process of relocating from the Boston area to my hometown in Southern California.  This is a huge change for me.  Many of my private practice clients will continue to see me for regular therapy sessions via online counseling (a topic for a separate article), but most of my clinic clients are not in a financial position to pay me out of pocket, and insurance doesn’t cover online therapy.  What this means is that recently, I had to look into the eyes of 31 people who I care very, very much about and tell them that I am no longer able to be part of their support system.

All this, on top of the normal stuff that comes with moving across the country – a grueling 45 hour drive in 4 days, figuring out the logistics of packing up my belongings, apartment searching, job searching, hugging all my Boston friends goodbye, and just generally wondering what life has in store.  And oh yeah, applying for my counseling license in California, since there’s no interstate reciprocity.

And on top of all that logistical stuff, there’s an emotional toll.  It’s the same emotional toll that comes from being in any period of transition, when you know something major is about to change in your life, but you can’t be there quite yet.  In a lot of ways, it’s like what most people experience when they’re planning a wedding, or having a baby, or buying a house, or preparing for their elderly parent to move in with them, or getting ready to go away to college.  Any of these things is a huge change that happens in a way that you can plan (as opposed to illness, car accidents, winning the lottery – all huge life changes that happen suddenly and spontaneously), which means that there’s a period of anticipation.

That anticipation – it’s exciting, but it’s also frustrating.  It’s like having a foot in each world, and not really being able to put all your weight in either.  You don’t want to put down roots in the old life because that’s about to change.  And you’re not really in a position to make concrete plans for the life to come, because there are so many unknown factors.

Or, in other words, it’s about being in the gap.  Allow me to explain.

My supervisor, who I also view as a mentor, is knowledgeable about Buddhist philosophy.  He told me that in Buddhism, there are four parts to a breath:

1. Inhale
2. Hold the breath
3. Exhale
4. Gap

The gap is that space between breaths where nothing much is really going on.  You’ve finished the last breath and you haven’t quite started the next one, so for a moment, you’re not breathing.  But it’s not like you panic every time you finish exhaling – you know the next breath will come.  I think it’s a beautiful metaphor for periods of transition.

So that’s how I’m trying to think about it.  Everything feels like chaos right now while I get ready to move.  But it’s not chaos, not really.  It’s just the gap.  And soon, the next breath will come.

Packed Into a Gender Box

 

Recently, I have begun a journey to increase my overall health, including modifying my diet and exercising regularly.  This is a change that is long overdue (and will probably get a blog article all to itself at some point), but it has had an unintended side effect: some people seem to think that wanting to lose weight and become healthier is synonymous with trying to be “more feminine” and have made comments along these lines, asking me whether I’m going to wear makeup more regularly or change the way I dress.

My upbringing never encouraged me to be a “girly girl.”  I also didn’t really think of myself as a “tomboy.”  I played dress up and house and loved to sing and dance, but was much more interested in train tracks, blocks, Legos, and bugs – and this was never criticized or redirected.  By merit of cisgender privilege, where I fall on the gender spectrum isn’t something I gave very much thought to until a few years ago when I became actively interested – through friendships with some amazing trans* people as well as my developing professional interests – in learning about the effects of how gender (beyond male vs female) affects people.  So I am surprised to discover how much these kinds of comments bother me.  After giving it some thought, I realized I’ve never felt comfortable being squished into a gender box.

Allow me to clarify – I am a cisgender female.  I don’t have any dysphoric thoughts about my gender, desire to be perceived as male, or interest in undergoing surgery to present as non-female.  Sometimes I wear dresses.  Once in a great while, when the mood strikes me, I even wear makeup.  My hobbies and interests include things like crafts and going to the theatre.  And – if you’re reading this blog you already know this – I’m a therapist, which is a profession that is largely female-dominated.  But an expectation that I should try to live up to some mythological feminine group of characteristics is really bothersome to me.

All this just drives home what I’ve been saying for quite some time: gender is neither simple nor binary.  The first question that’s asked when someone is pregnant is usually “is it a girl or a boy?” or even “what is it?”  This latter question seems to imply that male and female are completely different and separate entities with no overlap, and the use of “what” rather than “who” implies that a person is defined primarily if not exclusively by maleness or femaleness (which is determined by the physical appearance of the person’s genitals), rather than anything about the personality, disposition, interests, intellectual pursuits, hopes, or dreams of the person being brought into the world.

I guess the next curiosity is what is it that bothers me so much about being encouraged to be “feminine.”  Maybe it’s that feminine is frequently used to mean weak, vapid, or superficial, whereas “masculine” typically implies strong, ambitious, and adventurous.  Obviously, these stereotypes and expectations are inherently problematic, and a lot of it has come to light in the recent gender swapping trend.  Just think about how differently you envision a person in a story depending on the pronoun.  Here’s an example:

"I was out with a friend, and she said she wanted to get lunch."

"I was out with a friend, and he said he wanted to get lunch."

What is the picture you get in your head when you read those sentences?  You’re probably picturing different lunch choices depending on the gender of the person.  You’re probably imagining being out at different places before the lunch suggestion comes up.  Depending on the gender of the person telling this story, you’re probably imagining a different kind of chemistry between the narrator and the friend.  Weird, right? 

(If you're still not convinced there's a bias, check out the Harvard Implicit Association Test, which measures subconscious assumptions about gender attitudes.)

I recently read this article about the problem with classifying female characters as “strong.”  The article argues that it’s not a very useful adjective when applied to male characters, so it’s meaningless when it comes to females.  If I think of some of my favorite “strong” female characters, though, they have other great qualities too.  Here are some examples:

• ·         Hermione from Harry Potter – Strong, yes.  But also incredibly smart, hardworking, caring, loyal, resourceful, prepared, and determined.
   
• ·         Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Strong, obviously, even in the most literal sense of the word.  But connected, protective, devoted, and with a strong sense of responsibility. 

• ·         Elphaba from Wicked (the musical, not the book) – An activist, an advocate, a fighter, which are all strong characteristics.  But she is also intelligent, fiercely loyal to her sister, able to make tough choices, compassionate, and forced with a litany of tough choices.

This list could go on and on.  I don’t think any of these girls/women are built to be “just strong,” but that’s the first word that comes to mind for most people when describing them.  Why, if male characters are just presumed to be strong, is that the case?  I would argue that the most interesting and likeable characters are complex – so if “strong” is a presumed male characteristic, and the most interesting female characters are strong, maybe the most interesting male characters are compassionate– a word that is basically never used to describe female characters, because it’s already presumed to be true.

Perhaps this is what bothers me so much about being boxed in as someone who should aspire to femininity.  It’s not that I don’t want to be kind or pretty – it’s that I would hope I’m more interesting and layered than just that.  I want to be able to put on a dress and knit and go to the theatre – but I also want to be able to kick ass on a ski slope, or try something adventurous that requires the strength and ingenuity of Katniss from The Hunger Games or Tris from Divergent.  

If you could get anything out of this blog article, which is much more stream of consciousness than what I usually post, I would hope it would be an examination of your own gender identity.  Sure, you may not identify as transgender or genderfluid – but what does your gender mean to you, and are there pieces of you that might not be traditionally called “feminine” or “masculine”?  Food for thought…

 

Laverne Cox is My New Hero

 

Anyone who has been spending a lot of time with me lately can tell you that my newest obsession is the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black.”  Written by Jenji Kohan and based on the memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, OitNB is an amazing show about a women’s prison, and it tackles all kinds of Big Issues, such as race, class, culture, sexuality, prison abuse, and mental illness, to name a few.  I started watching it because a friend reached out and recommended it, calling the show “so important” and telling me that I would “absolutely love it.”  (She was right, obviously.)

It pretty quickly became apparent why my friend had reached out.  Any time there’s anything about transgender people in the news or media, I get a slew of emails, calls, text messages, and Facebook newsfeed updates making sure I’m up to date.  The people in my life know I have a passion for transgender equality and working with the trans* community, so I’m kept pretty in the loop.  But my friend – who perhaps wanted to surprise me – didn’t mention the character Sophia when she told me to watch the show.  She just told me to watch it, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that a prominent character was a transwoman.

Whenever I see transpeople in media, I look up who the actor is.  I have mixed feelings about the fact that I do this.  For example, I was watching the episode of Eli Stone called “Two Ministers” and was surprised to learn that the role of Michelle, a transwoman and minister who is filing a wrongful termination lawsuit, is played (quite convincingly) by Dallas Malloy, a cisgender woman.  She was great, and apparently she’s played transwomen in other works too, but when I asked a friend to guess the actor’s birth sex, her response was, “I don’t know… and I don’t know how I feel about wanting to know.” 

It makes sense.  If I spend my whole life fighting for the right to be who I am, then it stands to reason that I would hope an ally and advocate would take my gender identity at face value without delving deeper into a past I’m trying to leave behind. 

But on the other hand, I want to know that transpeople are being given these acting opportunities.  I loved Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, but she’s a ciswoman, and I’m excited to see Neil Patrick Harris as Hedwig (of “and the Angry Inch” fame) when it opens on Broadway, but he’s a cisman.  I bet there are a ton of transgender actors out there who are dying for some screen time, especially in complex and multidimensional roles such as these where they can have the opportunity to be cast as something other than “transsexual prostitute.” 

So I was thrilled – absolutely thrilled – to see that Sophia is being played by an honest-to-goodness transwoman named Laverne Cox.  And Ms. Cox is, in a word, amazing.

First, thoughts on the character Sophia.  For those of you who haven’t binge-watched the series yet (no spoilers, I promise), Sophia defies convention on many levels.  First of all, she’s not in prison for drugs or prostitution – her crime, which I won’t give away, is something much more unexpected.  Her wife accompanies and guides her through her transition, and the family remains intact.  Incarcerated, Sophia is brilliant, interesting, complex, strong, intelligent, helpful, loving, kind, tolerant, patient, and a million other things.  She handles adversity and discrimination with grace, and is so much more than just a “token” transwoman.

And Laverne Cox – I spent some time researching her.  She is an actress, but also an advocate and educator.  In this great segment on NPR, she talks about the role and what a great opportunity it is, and the challenges of being a transperson of color and also being an actor.  Her website, which is mostly dedicated to her acting career, has a page all about gender identity and equality. 

And in Sophia’s backstory, Laverne’s identical twin brother plays her past, pre-transition self.  How cool is that?!

As a therapist who works with transpeople, many of whom are young or closeted, I’m always looking for positive role models to point them to.  Trans visibility is sadly limited in the general population, and often, the only recognizable celebrity I can point people to is Chaz Bono.  I hope Laverne Cox continues to build her fame to a level where she’s a household name.  I hope producers who watch this show will see the value in casting a transperson for deep, multifaceted trans* roles.  I think that if this happens, it’s a great step towards normalizing the transgender experience, and making the world a more habitable and friendly place for all people – cismen, ciswomen, transmen, transwomen, and genderqueer folks – to live together in peace and camaraderie.

So Laverne Cox, you give me hope.