Lanyon abstract art and the soul turned outwards.

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Having recently spent some time in Cornwall specifically to look at the work of the abstract expressionist painter Peter Lanyon.  I wanted to get a broader understanding of what he was trying to illuminate through his work. I was equally looking at the way an abstract painter develops their approach to get at their truth. I think a lot of abstract artists find there is a fight with the limitations of the medium they are working in. They are toiling to turn paint in this case into a core representation of pure feeling. To convey the essence of their perspective without the flat illustrative method of mere representation requires a deep philosophical connection with the subject matter. It necessitates negotiation of a labyrinth of complex internal feelings, not only about the subject itself but also about what it is revealing inside the artist themselves.

Peter Lanyon to me is a very important painter in the sense of trying to tell the story of his place. His work on first contact is a confusing collection of perspective and thick layered oils. This makes initial understanding and comprehension difficult and complex as the brain is seeking recognisable structure and form in order to interpret what it sees. A common issue with abstraction. Some may connect purely as an aesthetic experience based upon tonality and colour but Lanyon and other abstract painters are not seeking an aesthetic experience they have found pure aesthetics constrains communication and feeling, which is why they choose to push paint beyond its formal boundaries and seek to represent their experience of the world in the many facets and perspectives it represents to them.

This brings me to place. I sought out the land where Lanyon painted and the areas of Cornwall where he found inspiration. I saw his paintings first and as I said I found them difficult, so I sought out the places that he represented. In particular I went to the mining districts of Cornwall around St Just and walked the land and stood and watched and felt the earth beneath my feet. I explored the variation in rock form, the shifts in perspective and vista and I experienced the abandoned mining buildings and read what happened at these mines and the labour and the intense heavy industry these places were home to. I looked at the colour, the sky, the vegetation and the earth and each night I came home I looked at Peter Lanyon’s paintings again. I was gradually beginning to understand how close Peter was coming to connecting with the spirit and heart of this landscape. It was revelatory to experience art in this way. To not just stand and look at a landscape and see it illustrated in a painting, but to be in the landscape and see all its elements uncovered in a previously complex work of art. His palette became the vegetation, the earth and rocks and his shapes became the shifting perspective of light changing. The thickness of paint made one feel the land under foot and his work was conveying these elements as a Cornish painter who knew his landscape and loved what he saw enough to dedicate his life to trying to convey these feelings of place.

The medium of paint for me can only explore an emotional response to something through abstraction. Through the constant turning and re turning of colour and density on canvas. Perhaps the reason Peter was not more regarded, is that he spoke so specifically well of the Cornish landscape. His pictures were very Cornish in the sense of the history his paintings spoke of. His influence would have been great however upon any  artist who was looking at paint and seeking to represent the essence of place and not just merely illustrate an aesthetic response. I spoke to some visitors to the exhibition and many if not all were dismissive and felt a failure to connect or understand what was being said. Some paintings they found aesthetically pleasing and this was enough.  There is so much more there in all great dedicated abstract expression, so much more is given by the artist themselves in trying to find the centre of a meaning and to communicate that. Perhaps as I did, one has to deliberately go out and sense the place the work was created in to fully grasp what a painting means or seeks to convey.  Is it worth it? Most definitely yes ,that is how one learns as an artist and develops an appreciation of other artists work and thought and it also expands our own creative channels. It stimulates our nervous system to seek our own response to our own landscapes and to break through the one dimensional nature of illustration.

Peter’s later paintings were ones done as he became more interested in flying and started viewing the landscape from above. His paint becomes thinner as the distance between himself and the land increases. He is seeing through cloud and veils of blue and experiencing  the land quite differently and this is easily felt in the later works and in many ways far more initially accessible. It is 40 years since Peter had his work displayed in a major exhibition and it seems appropriate that Cornwall would be the place for that given the works are so part of that landscape. I hope more people get to see what he was producing in the 50’s and compare this to the likes of De Kooning in America and realise that Peter’s work was very definitely central in a global group of artists seeing abstraction as a necessary response of the soul.

The painting shown is not by Peter Lanyon but rather Willem De Kooning part of the global abstract expression movement during the 1950’s

 

Related Articles

• Bob Crossley: Abstract painter whose work was inspired by his love of the Cornish landscape (independent.co.uk)
• Sharon L. Butler: Abstract Expressionist New York: Line and Legacy (huffingtonpost.com)

Pro-Actively looking at Depression through Art

 

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Herman Melville opens Moby Dick with his desire to see the ‘watery part of the world’ whenever there is a damp dreary November in his soul. I have that damp dreary November soul and I will head to the coast tonight and look for something there that in some way soothes the ‘neutrality’ I feel. It is strange how one may talk of neutrality of feeling and seek a solution in the coast. A place that is as indifferent to my presence as much as anywhere else is. I imagine gazing upon something far larger and more infinite than one normally engages with leads one to feel a sense that our own problems and difficulties need a sense of scale and proportion, perhaps that is the simple balm. In front of all this beauty and nature unsharpened, I imagine that we feel something of where we come from and what we go back to. The journeys in-between just being that, travels from no place to no place. The places we find en route in our lives are the only significance we are ever likely to encounter.  This makes one feel that perhaps the time we have is very short and that to pursue ideas or explanations of the infinite leads us to deep unhappiness and that our search should be to find the joys within the precious golden hours of now.  This brings me to how through such pursuits we seek to challenge the neutrality of depressive feelings.

Path: p
When one is in a state of depression it is very hard to engage with anything at all. One is aware that this is time slipping past and that non feeling is a cruel deprivation and also of the responsibility one has to other people as well as oneself to make the most of life and all the moments of freedom and joy it contains. To be depressed is not to lose sight of this, to be depressed is to be even more aware of the gap between something and nothing. To look it in the face and attempt to find joy is what I do every day through the creative world. I look at the ideas and thinking of others, their painting, their poetry, their films or photography what they feel about life through their chosen medium of expression. I am travelling nearly 300 miles to see a small exhibition. The idea is to push the depression back or challenge its presence. I do this by going as far as possible to the end of land in this case and then seeking out beauty in the smallest of things. I admit it is a huge challenge and it does require enormous effort. I never experience much as joy, they tend to be things to surmount rather than look forward to.

Path: p
I am never sure how much depression reveals to you and how much it hides from you. I feel a dissatisfaction in most things but it is hard to say whether that is the root of the thing itself being made real. Objects are objects, we have somehow to draw joy from or imbue sadness with when they inherently contain neither. Does depression switch off this ability to attach emotion to objects? I say attach to objects, as depression maybe a flaw in the ability to engage with the exterior world in such a way that sufferers cannot make these artificial attachments to objects. The brain has to possess this function or mechanism and in some way depression makes the link difficult. People may say well if it made the link difficult how does one experience sadness. I would suggest depression is not sadness more a neutrality, a lack of feeling. The ‘sadness’ comes from the inability to feel not from the experience of a particular person, place or thing.  The sadness is a by product of neutrality and I personally feel the neutrality leads to the indifference that creates sadness. We can’t connect emotionally to external objects that is the sad part.

Path: p
The sea is mythical and also real it has many symbolic meanings. By going there I am acknowledging, or rather my brain is, the things that make the sea an important part of our ancestral genetic picture. I love Keats and the romantic poets, that took the sea and made glorious music. I also adore Debussy and other composers that have taken it as a place of gift and beauty. Wagner’s  Tristan and Isolde is possibly for me one of the greatest works of art. These are all triggers for me. The place itself is beautiful. I experience its magnificent beauty independently but also have these other connections coded into my neural network. In going to the coast am I trying to overwhelm my sense of permanent neutrality. Is this possible? Can the exposure to beautiful natural objects with the positivity one already feels through art have an effect on depression or does such brief exposure leave one more neutral in order that a return to somewhere less beautiful becomes easier to bear.

Path: p
The fact I write about what others would take for granted suggests a brain over engaged in self analysis. A brain that finds it difficult to ‘enjoy’ or experience things happily. This is despite the fact my brain is very aware of these things being not beneficial to my personal well being. I think it raises interesting questions about the nature of depression and its self destructive intent. One recognises this in other diseases such as the inflammatory based ones where the body in effect attacks its own cells and destroys the body slowly from within. Depression suffocates attachment and dilutes human emotion centres in the brain and leads to destructive behaviour and thinking. The inability to attach to objects in any real emotional sense makes for a harsh neutrality as the world of external things relies upon our brains to connect with them in order that we feel emotion about a person a place an object and indeed ourselves.  I am seeking out attachment through a trip to the coast and a small collection of art work. It is very conscious deliberate and a psychological effort. It is also an experiment in feeling, one in which I hope to lose consciousness of myself perceiving things and just be at one in a place and with the objects and not have to try so very hard to tell myself this is something I should be enjoying.

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Filters

 

Image by mseckington via Flickr

 

A neurotic internal dialogue which questions ideas about gender, identity, celebrity culture and the contained madness that we all have to somehow ‘filter’ in order that we function. I wrote it a while ago but I thought it fitted well with the earlier posts about I and self and the impact the outside has on the inside. How madness is a gentle falling rather than a sudden collapse and a collective accepting or dismissing based upon universality of opinion.  The neurosis displayed here is not unlike the facebook and social network culture of brief punctuation between the next random thought. The gradualness of thought assembling and dissembling all at the same time. This neural activity like some form of universal pinball network with thoughts colliding adding subtracting from a nonsensical whole, accumulation of ? Its maths mainly we are processing at enormous speed. Maths flying through our ears and in through our eyes.   Our internal minds as maps of the universe spinning outwards trying to assimilate the bits we need at certain moments and having to filter very quickly almost beyond our genetic ability the ideas that are relevant to us or that we choose to allow to construct us.

I had breakfast
with David and Victoria.
David said I could
have his Orange juice.

I like David a lot.
He doesnt like me.

It is hot in L.A.
Sometimes I stay in
and go through Vicky’s things.
I can’t get into them
as she is tiny.

I am bored.

I call Paris (not the city).
We have lunch in
her pink Bentley.
She is my best girlfriend,
and we talk about boys.

They are demonstrating about War.
We are being photographed.
People are dying right now,
and the world is on fire.

She is beautiful and
I am very ugly.
I say, “Paris in your video.”
She blushes.

“You are so like me
especially in the bathroom
when you are in those
black knickers
and looking at your perfect
reflection.”

She hugs me, and the skin
on her face comes away.
She smiles.
Bones teeth and muscle.
“Are you ok?” I say.
I pick up her face
and she says, ‘try it.’
I do.

The electric window falls.
We laugh.
One thousand suns
flash in my eyes.

‘Paris!’ (not the city).
‘Paris here over here!’
I close the window.
I return her face.
We giggle that was such fun.
She drops me off at my
doctor.

He is giving me injections
so my breasts will grow.
He has done nothing with
my penis, which I hate.
He says if I keep it
I can make money in
porn, and get really hot boyfriends.
“As hot as David?”
He says ‘sure.’

“Can you give me an injection
so I can save people
who are unhappy?”
Pick them up and take
them to a safe place.
He says ‘no that would make
you a superhero.’
But he knows someone in the
hills who talks with
the dead.

I like having so much money.
I pay for cute guys
to come over.
I just lay on the bed
and look at their
bronze bodies and tight asses.
They do what I want.
They twirl, bend over,
fetch me things, get
on all fours, growl,
and let me take pictures,
even kiss my feet.
I let them have my bagel.
Just one thousand dollars.
I think they all fall in love with me.
They keep calling my cell.

There are lots of drugs
I would like to try.
They all look so sexy
in their little white bottles.
Those long black names.
Some are in capitals
but I like the lowercase ones.
I wish Prada made drugs.
How amazing! Or even Gucci,
that would be fabulous.

I would have a designer bloodstream.
I just know my cells would love it.
They would be flawless.
I would cut myself and that is nice.
Under a microscope you can see,
the white cells with Prada written in
the centre.

People go to prison sometmes.
For lots of things.
I like the ones who do terrible crimes.
Its fun to watch and TV does it so well.
People write and say so much
about the awful ones.
They get the best graphics
and really good looking, clever people
interested in them.

I am a boy but really a girl.
I dont know to which prison,
they would send me.
I would get a really expensive lawyer.
It would take years for them to decide
and everyone would talk about me forever.
How great would that be?
So great, so amazing.
I would get more google searches,
than Paris and Vicky,
but they are my friends,
and I am not a bitch.

The supreme court ruled.
The boy is an abnormal growth
and must be removed.
The red bar would run along,
the bottom of huge televisions.
Brad and Angelina would
say something at this
point.
All over the world,
people would send texts
about me.

I would of course have to do terrible things.
I am so lazy though,
and it is so hot.

I watch Vicky get ready,
some of her girlfriends
dont like me.
They are all better looking than me.
I have read more books so screw those
thick whores.

I get angry sometimes.
I dont like being inside out
and people not seeing the real me.
Like you do…

Art & The Individual, A Haven for Difference

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After a disastrous appointment at a gender clinic in London, I have been thinking to myself the weight of pressure we place upon ourselves to create futures and bring others along with us in the creation of our dreams. The human need for affirmation and cultural acceptance is incredibly strong and we as individuals are constantly trying to fulfil this tremendous sense of self purpose whilst at the same time seeking in others an understanding that in some way we are ‘right’ in the choices we make. If we make choices that exist outside of the cultural norm we feel an incredible sense of isolation and difficulty with expressing that. Of course psychologically no one wishes to spend their lives in having to justify what they perceive they are.  Yet at the same time most of us want wider acceptance without having to acquiesce or fit in. In other words we want that ideal sense of human individuality our individual uniqueness to shine yet we also want the light of understanding from others too.

We have the individual desperately striving to be themselves whilst we also have to acknowledge the collective spaces we occupy and the sense of difference and responsibility this brings in a parallel time frame. The world of Art probably best allows us to express that individuality. It gives us a social arena where the individual is afforded by the wider collective a right to express themselves within that context. We feel this individual expression afforded here, by proxy underlines all our senses of the world seen in microcosm. It speaks to us all in varying ways, even if we think the expression trite and self serving in some way it affirms us and says there is a place where we can be just one voice in a global cacophony of sound. Art enriches us all in this way, it goes beyond the normal notion of cultural conformity and has no walls.

Outside of Art and the culturally allowed frame of self expression we have the life we must lead as others do. We must work, engage, interact, travel, have social discourse be involved in our local communities and share concern for our neighbours and the environment we inhabit. We want our lives to be productive, contributory and useful. Our individuality should not seek to withdraw from social collective responsibility but it is in these spaces that our uniqueness is halted. The majority takes precedence and of course in communities that is a sensible model for cohesive social growth. The problem is the extent to which the individual is allowed access to contribute it they are outside of the ‘normal’ expectations of a wider social group. These expectations are of course socially malleable depending upon the surrounding environment one is lucky enough or not to live in. It would not seem to take a wide social anthropological study to say that perhaps those in communities with less access to education, finance and broader senses of a world beyond the narrowness that financial constraint imposes, would welcome less an individual expressing themselves for example as I would outside of the gender binary norm. In communities where there is a greater sense of a broader world based upon a wider exposure to a diversity and cultural difference perhaps one might find more of a chance to express themselves.

The question for the individual is how they approach the need for self authenticity with the need also to be in the world, when being in that world often means abuse, ridicule, potential harm, and lack of empathy or support. The psychological strain is enormous as it is rather like crossing a frozen lake where on the other side we feel awaiting us is a personal sense of fulfilment a place where we will meet our true self. This is only a feeling however, it is a dream and a belief, it is an internal map that speaks to us and continually forces our feet in its direction. This is inbuilt and not something I  understand, it is the chemistry of my mind and the amalgamation of my life and it leads me there. I have no comprehension as to how individual elements of me have brought me to what I consider my identity now. I just know I am here. The crossing of this lake is enormously difficult and fraught with individual self doubt and the wider collective reiteration of the dangers involved.   I can of course stay here and never cross and be subsumed into the collective and exist as someone who can go from day to day and contribute and be accepted. I don’t have to look for tribes that will take me in like some abandoned creature and that will further distance me from the reality of life. Yes it is important that common niche groups form collective and cohesive bonds to build awareness and address collective difference of opinion. That is positive and I want to be active there but I don’t want to be active there so the niche group defines me more than I define myself.

Art is indeed a refuge and that is why I spend so much time there. So much time creating, thinking and exploring individual expression that does not seek a wider acceptance but just expresses the inner self. I seek it because it allows one freedom to be oneself and also if honest hide oneself in explanations of eccentricity and the individual thought that Art expects and allows. It does not make a tube ride easier or sitting in a waiting room or shopping or conversing with others any less fraught or difficult. It does present a haven, a place where identity is fluid and a feeling one doesn’t need to explain. It is a space free of affirmation, it is a place where we see others who think differently and spend their lives in these small authentic interior spaces. It is an arena where one is free from justification, one is accepted via the door of creativity and one finds tranquillity despite the difficulty in the creation or getting out in our chosen medium the wonder and sadness of existence. The pain and joy of being alive and the capturing of  that as mere episodes in time passing.

I would like to write more about this dichotomy and the havens that we seek to find peace in living the unique authentic us under the pressure of collective thought and programmed thinking. It is very difficult though as what one wants is the right to be part of both and one’s life isn’t long enough to make that happen. The choice is to find personal happiness without excluding oneself from the world that others experience too. To not be only concerned with our authenticity but also to want to give all we can to make life better for all people who live it. I would hate my personal choice to leave me outside of that. I think I would find equal unhappiness if by my following my own dream I couldn’t help or contribute to the dreams of others.

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The battle to find an authentic I?

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It is easy to feel we are unique in our experience of trying to find a valid truth. Our search for truth as individuals takes place under the identity of gender related issues.  Many others truth follow this same pattern of projecting themselves into a future life ahead where they seek to find their real authentic self, and replace the feelings of inauthenticity they currently live. For them it may not be gender but could be one of a thousand other things unique to them and their authenticity.

To be human is to always have this feeling of living ahead of ourselves. We are constantly doing something that has a future outcome, we are moving forward in time constantly and we are always in the service of duties now for a future purpose. This was recognised many thousands years ago and became the main tenets of a Buddhist outlook where their proclamation was to slow this projection of ourselves into future spaces and to practice the art of mindfulness so we stayed in the present moment. This was to reduce human anxiety and also to fight the never ending sense of time moving away from us and our perceptions that we had to find some form of structure in an as yet non existent place.

This is very important today, particularly as most people live within large population centres .  This way of living makes it necessary to conform to mass patterns of behaviour. This fundamentally leads to a loss of the individual self.  We perceive ourselves as one amongst many and to hold on to our authentic individual true self is an enormous struggle. We are not essentially one as human beings but rather we are I. There is an enormous difference, as to be I we have to live outside of the communal one. Our identity has to be unabsorbed from  mass market global cultural ideas.

We can never find personal identity within a democratic majority. However much we believe in the collective truth we can never forsake our own truth to a political and ideological process that seeks to sacrifice individual thought for the wider ‘good’. We occupy these spaces particular in large centres with a million other I’s that have become one amongst a larger collective industrious hive. As humans this difficulty in expressing I leads to anxiety, depression and mental health issues as we are forced into patterns of living that allow no expression of our individual truth.

Some, like gender dysphorics go in search of the I. They seek their authentic self and pay dearly the price of expressing their I. The culture is an enormously powerful instrument of control and management. I becomes indoctrinated into one and we never lose that sense of trying to fit in purely because we are brain washed into thinking that in some sense to insist on the I we are anarchic, dangerous and not for the wider good.  If we all lived the I then society could not function we are told.  The culture does not represent individual thought it represents a common consensus of values which are a historical collective that makes a functioning organisational unit.

We all in seeking an authentic I have to face these obstacles head on. In doing so we seek to undo the one and find the I. This takes huge strength and determination and often requires medical intervention to reduce the stress of thinking against the collective.  In seeking to express I, we will be challenged constantly about our individual perception of truth. We will be labelled, defined, left out, critiqued and also ignored. We will have to stand alone and shout to be heard and also face ridicule as our separation from the one is not looked upon fondly by individuals living their own inauthentic I and so they do not welcome the questions posed by those seeking their own authentic I as it challenges their assumptions about truth and unsettles them about their own certainties. To challenge certainty is never popular as Socrates found out over two thousand years ago.  Government agencies whose job it is to secure a collective one also find no place within their systems for authentic I’s. They make things complex, they screw with their databases and make things complicated and costly.

These are just some thoughts about how we all have to battle if we seek to become an authentic I. It shows a commonality hopefully between people like me who are perceived to be different with everyone else who wishes to seek their own I in whatever form that takes. I would hope for respect as a human being for pursuing my truth first and the realm of the truth in my case gender should be less relevant. I would like to be seen as someone who is not afraid to search out the truth as they perceive and not be ridiculed because the place of my authentic I is unique to me. We are all I and not one, if that was the premise we started from then understanding and acceptance could be so much easier.

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric part 3

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Part 3

There was now a distinct difference between body types as I got to my mid teens. I looked increasingly different physically from girls around my own age and I started to feel the pain of that. How I describe the sensation of looking at another body and recognising that body as the external shell to my own interior world is almost impossible. My brain was saying over and over when I looked at girls of my own age, I am the same as you yet I am physically different. How did I know I was the same? I just felt that was the case. I cannot explain it any more deeply than that.  I just felt this body I had was wrong in the sense that it didn’t match the brain I had. It actually makes you feel claustrophobic if you think too much about it and if you don’t quickly turn your mind to something else. There was a real sense of definite panic or a wishing to flee from the thoughts.

I remember too at this age as sex was starting to play a part in teenage years, one would be exposed to pornography at school that other boys brought in. Of course it was always heterosexual pornography and I looked at it as everyone did. The one thing I remember in my attitude to it was not the arousal but a feeling of jealousy or rather the good fortune of the women in those roles having male attention. I always viewed pornography with the notion that I wanted to be the girl. I never perceived it from a male perspective in that I saw the women as objects of desire. I always thought that their role in the images suited my own personal psyche.  This of course could be attributed to my sexual attraction to men but I never imagined myself as a man with another man, only as the female with another man. I understood the representation of her heterosexual female pleasure and related to that alone. I didn’t look like her but I thought I felt how she did. These of course are only projections but I was experiencing sensations that I was a heterosexual female and not a homosexual male. It always felt like that even from this very very early time. I couldn’t put that into words then, but I was feeling something which wasn’t desire but rather understanding. I was aroused more by the idea of presenting as female to please a male sexually as opposed to any idea of pleasing myself. The idea of being penetrated seemed to my brain the most erotic thing but the idea of penetrating seemed odd to me or rather I had this penis but had no desire to replicate with girls or guys anything in the pictures.

I clearly remember those sensations and thoughts with regard to sexual penetration. I had this penis yet I looked at images and it felt strange to think of using it in the way the pictures described. It isn’t that I automatically thought I wanted a vagina and that I hated my own sex organs and there was this eureka moment of understanding. I still didn’t have a clue as to what my thoughts meant or if indeed anyone else felt that too. I doubted that but having no one to speak to and just playing the role one was expected to play I quickly learnt to override any feelings of that nature and slot in with the way everyone else thought or expressed themselves. I wasn’t about to discuss I dressed at home as a female and imagined myself with a male lover and not having a penis and so forth. That would have been insane to talk to 15 year old boys who one went to school with in that way. It would be impossible to talk  to anyone about that for decades. I even couldn’t talk to myself about that without feeling unwell and upset.

I looked facially quite feminine and my hair was long and I used to dye it lots of differing colours. I was dyeing my hair from about 15 onwards which other boys at school were not doing. I never saw this as strange and it kind of fitted in with a punk ethic but it was more for me a way of feminising without overtly making a statement I think. I hid behind this alternative fashion period which luckily emerged in the 80’s and I used it to somehow be a little bit more female than other boys whilst having a wider cultural excuse.  I was the one boy dyeing his hair and wearing eye liner at that age. At the time not significant but looking back there were 98% of other boys not doing that. Was I being drawn to the androgyny of the new romantic / punk era as a place to play with gender presentation, was it just fashion, was it my chance to push myself to look more female. Whatever the actual reasons I was doing something that other boys in the main were not. I was spending time on my hair, I was in stores looking at make up, I was looking at female magazines and also desperately wanting a boyfriend. Again at the time I didn’t feel I was transsexual as I had no concept of that word. I had all of the thoughts and feelings I have written about but I kept constantly ignoring myself and my thoughts.

I look back and think I was ignoring so many signs about myself and ignoring the real person or rather what my thoughts were. I was simply not aware that you could make any choices and as such I carried on and fell into life as I was supposed to live it or rather how everyone I knew or read about or saw on television was living it. The other person was forever isolated and lived in shadow, always listening for fear of discovery. It was not healthy and obviously led to my being prescribed anti depressants from about the age of 18 which to this day I still take.

Continued Part 4

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric part 2

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Part 2.

I spoke in the first part about a story of gender confusion from an early age, although at that age I had no concept that this had anything to do my gender as such. I just felt a connection with femininity or rather its outward expression as I saw the world around me as opposed to masculinity and how that was portrayed in the outside world. I had no sense that one should be a boy or a girl or that in essence I wasn’t a girl. I had no understanding of genitals I never contemplated them or thought about them and i didn’t really understand the difference anyhow. I didn’t know they were genitals or what their function was.

Who would I speak to at 6 years of age, where would my knowledge come from and how could I express myself in a language I had no perception of. At this age it was purely about feelings of wanting to wear what I saw my mother and sister wearing. To replicate them and be like the people I loved most deeply. Was this a sense of exclusion, was I seeking to be nearer to the people who were kindest and most loving to me. My father was an abusive monster so perhaps I was rejecting that experience of masculinity, I had no other to go by in the home environment. Did I see the kindness and love and gentle nature of my mother as a refuge from this terror. Was I trying to become her to avoid being him.

None of this took place as thought process then. It only takes place now as  I look back and try and piece together the moments of evolving perception that would later form part of my view of myself and the world. Was I trans gender from a biological standpoint in that in the womb certain chemical events happened that meant my brain and body followed separate paths. Did my external environment as a child drive me away from a masculinity that I saw as destructive, unkind and frightening toward the femininity that I felt safe and secure in. This environment was certainly one where my personal psychology was being formed to have a negative view of what it meant at that age to be male.

In the absence of a scientific diagnosis of this condition I can only try and piece together what I actually know about the events of my life and how I felt as a child in the environment within which I found myself. It was an intense isolated experience, my parents has few external friends and we were poor and had little access to reading or external influence. It was a little like the plays one reads of Tennessee Williams in that suffocating family atmosphere that pervaded my childhood. The strong maternal figure and the house being the epicentre of a universe I felt as very small.

When going out into the world and achieving well academically from a young age. I never lost this sense of being unable to slot into a convenient space with everyone else. I was fortunate in that I was born with a degree of intelligence that made school a place where I could do the things required from me and receive respect in that I was a good candidate to go to a better school when I was 12. I was equally highly aggressive at school toward other boys, not at all afraid and probably projecting the violence I experienced at home. I had this huge male figure to deal with a home of whom I was very frightened however these boys of my age looked like small dots in comparison and I was relentless in my pursuit of assuring that no one in my school space would intimidate me as I was intimidated at home.

I had also learned that fear was a good way of ensuring you were left alone and that if I had exposed any weakness of myself or for one moment expressed my feminine feelings then I would have been drowned at school. I would have had no place where I was safe. School would be safe and I would fight every day to ensure that was so.  I had to be someone else at a very young age and I was conscious of the effort it took. I lived ahead of myself and never was in the moment always planning and calculating how to deal with others and to present myself in situations. This was at 9 and 10 years old, s0 I was  suffering real stress and anxiety about a number of issues and not understanding why.

All of this as in Part 1 is me trying to look backwards and possibly see patterns that were present when I was very young and unable to process what all of this meant. I certainly see now that as a child I was under huge stress without ever recognising it as such. I was frightened to come home because of my father. I was another person at school to protect myself from further harm. I had huge secrets about my affinity with females and being unable to express that in any way other than through furtive dressing. I had yet to experience sexual feelings but when that did come when I attended an all boys grammar school this again led to again having to hide my feelings, suppress and bury them.

There was no Internet, no support groups, no doctors one could talk to. It was just me trying to understand why everything was so difficult and tiring. I had no concept that you could be born male and change that. I had never heard of transsexualism. I was totally isolated and couldn’t connect properly to the world at all. It certainly affected my studies and created a further deep sense of isolation and loneliness as I could not interact with my peers without enormous pretence and artifice which was eventually over time exhausting.

As my body changed and the distance between my physical self and the female physical world started to get further away I found this very painful but excepted an inevitability about it. I had not the slightest sense that one could ever do anything about it. I was very slim however and that made me feel slightly more connected, although my height increasingly made me look male. I started to envy the idea of breasts as I saw them develop on girls in my mid teens and felt my own physical shape was now certainly incorrect or at least not developing along lines that I wanted it to. I continued to dress at home and continued to assume this would be the only place I might be able to ever be myself in quiet intimate moments behind locked doors.

Part 3 to follow.

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The loneliness of the long distance gender dysphoric

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Part 1

From an early age we embark upon this marathon. The start is usually slow and we are not sure of why we feel different or indeed what might be amiss. We feel not quite right, fitting in seems difficult and from a very early age we start to keep secrets.

We keep secret the items of our sister’s clothes, or mother’s clothes we borrow. We always place them back so carefully and make sure that it looks like they have never been moved. We sit, if alone, in the house and try make up on and look at ourselves in the mirror and never really question why we do this. We are too young to understand. I do not understand why I would want to stand outside our home in make up when I was 9 years old and just stand there. The strange sensation has never left me. I had not a clue why or what it meant.

As I got a little older I started using sanitary towels and borrowing my sisters. It has no common sense to it at all and I am still unable to figure out why I was doing this at 11 years of age.  There was much loneliness and secrecy in all of this. I was always in fear that I would get caught. I equally could not stop, I had to dress it was essential to me. This to a child from the age of around 6 is a long time to keep secrets. Children should not be keeping those kind of momentous secrets. Childhood is not a time for secrets only in play. A child should not lie in bed alone and wonder if he will be discovered and live in fear of what will happen. I didn’t know it was wrong I just got a sense others might see it as not right and stop loving me. There is a big difference there in thinking the thing itself is wrong and fearing an outcome. My fear was always the outcome. I simply would be unable to explain something I had no hope of understanding myself.

I was afraid without knowing why.  In essence I was suffering anxiety from a very early age. Rather as we get older panic or anxiety can overtake us and we find ourselves needing outside help to control our feelings. I was a child who did not have the faintest idea about anxiety or being trans gender or being anything else for that matter. I was just a child who would withdraw rather than integrate and this I look back on now was always probably being in fear of being discovered. Of letting something slip about my secret. To give myself away somehow. I was therefore lonely as a child, I found it hard to express myself and equally found it hard to relate to others around me. I found boys intimidating and I found girls impossibly pretty and I was envious of their clothes and their hair and their complexion and would see myself in them, in a way I cannot describe.

As puberty came I never experienced anything other than attraction to boys. I had no sense of that not being the most normal thing in the world. I was attracted to their shape and presence and even though I was one myself I never felt an affinity with them. I always looked on them as different to me somehow and that I was different to them. I therefore now had to keep my sexuality secret. I could not share or enjoy that as I had no knowledge of anyone else who might feel like me. I was again very lonely and felt outside as boys began to talk of girls and I had nothing to say.

These are the times as you start to mature that you learn to adapt and fit in. You begin to learn the things to say that will make you accepted. You begin to learn the way of doing things that will make it less likely you are found out. Teenage boys have lots of secrets and it was a time when I felt although my secrets were different other boys still had them. Things like smoking and girlfriends and drinking alcohol and I had mine too and parents were so dull and they wouldn’t understand. They problem was I was lying and lonely and never myself. I had learnt what to do, but I had still to learn how to cope with how I was and what I felt deep inside about me and about my attraction to boys. I was dressing more at home as my room was now a private space and people knocked before they entered. The only thing I could safely wear was underwear and it was the safest thing to borrow. It was the easiest thing to hand that made me connect with some outside aspect of my femininity.

I started to feel uncomfortable with my body and how it was developing and it started to make me more anxious about seeing myself change into something I didn’t recognise at all now. I was always rather feminine in the face and indeed at up to age 16 or so if you put me in a dress I would look like a girl, if you disregarded my height and size. The problem was my body was moving further away from the girls I saw all around me. I was taller, broader, my voice was now much different and I could see this huge difference and I was starting to find that increasingly stressful in my private moments. Again I had no idea what this meant. I just thought there was something wrong with me without having any sense what wrong was. to be continued…

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Roll up for the transsexual circus tickets 5 bucks

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The sex market is without doubt the greatest generator of traffic on the Internet and also the greatest revenue generator on the Internet. The Internet drowns us, we are up to our necks in its pervasive influence.  Sex drives staggering volumes of traffic, millions upon millions  of searches for pornography occur each day and tens of thousands every single minute.  One of the abilities of the Internet is to take niche areas where the content generators themselves are small in number and spread that handful of unique difference to the voracious bored appetites of millions of consumers of pornography. How does this relate to the community of people who are gender dysphoric.  This is a wide but flat community. It consists of small numbers of people who have had surgery and they are appearance wise half male and half female. They do not go through with a full sex change as this would be commercial suicide, because who would pay to access images of a woman who used to be a man who is now fully a female. She would look totally female and the consumers of porn would find no value in this and therefore would not part with any money to see it. The producers aren’t interested and the trans woman would be just a trans woman. She is not a fetish. You can have sex with a real woman, she probably looks better. Some people might be interested in our vaginoplasty but once they see it move on, hey who cares.

The fetish is the half and half , the man who keeps his penis whilst having the face and breasts of a woman. This is a huge fetish online. She males as the derogatory term used, attracts staggering online searches and interest. You could pay for any surgery you imagine quite quickly if you became part of this industry. If you kept your penis and decided to run your own online buisness, your own offline business indeed anything at all to do with providing food for the appetite of those who see us as objects of sexual fantasy. We have been fetishised and we are worth money to pornographers. We have a value and it is hard cash. People will pay to see us. like the bearded lady at the circus or the Siamese twins. We are part of the roll up roll up merry go round of wider culture.

Guys want to date us if we keep our cocks. They want to spoil us as long as we look female on the outside and a boy in our pants. We have it made financially as long as we sell ourselves to further the fetish we are.   We are the fringes of society, we are the people who people look at and feel they can ask any question they want of us. Are you a guy or a girl, have you got a pussy or a cock, who do you have sex with gay guys or straight guys. We are seen as not requiring privacy but people who are sexual objects to be discussed and questioned about why, who, how and what.

We are non people we are like the woman who has giant tits, the guy with the huge cock, the girl who does gang bangs. In other words we are sexual objects for a world who wants to see inside our pants. They do not see us, they do not want to see us. Look good, get your surgery and make the price back everyone wins don’t they? To present yourself to this market will cost you £50,000 + so its a business investment. Who can afford £50,000 to have cosmetic surgery possibly 1% of people with gender dysphroia.  So where do they go after surgery back to a world who sees us as freaks, objects  of fetishism or one of harassment in the work place and career prospects harmed and questionable. To walk out of a gender clinic and be told live for 2 years as a woman, that is dress as one and wear a wig whilst you look like a man. Where are our real options, who wants us. We are in desperate pain we want to be women, we want to feel wanted and accepted but now we have huge bills to pay in order to look the way we feel we should have been born. It isn’t a sob story that is what it means to many gender dysphorics,  look at t he suicide rates for people who cannot change have no alternatives but to wait for an NHS system who also has a 2 year agenda of ridicule.  I myself have waited 2 years for 2 appointments is that treatment I don’t think it is. Who is there to help?

The guy in the dark alley with a handful of cash saying I can solve your problems honey. He has plenty of buyers for you waiting. Waiting to see your tits and cock and if facially your surgeon has done a good job and the surgeons who did your hair and the surgeons who did your breasts also did a good job then you might make the cost of it all back by selling yourself as the object of expected male desire you have now become.   The fetish you now are in the world’s biggest marketplace.

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Why must Gender Dysphorics know all the answers?

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I wrote in a previous post about the costs involved in trying to make oneself the person one believes themselves to be. I would use the word ‘knows’ themselves to be, but even the most ‘celebrated’ transsexuals in the world often have their doubts and some have even come out fervently against how they were advised. How many people out there know anything definite, how many people do we hear say I did my best at the time. Well people with gender dysphoria are no exception they do their best at the time to understand what is happening to them and they hopefully take a course of action that is right for them. Having gender dysphoria doesn’t unfortunately give you a super power to see into the future.  It doesn’t imbue you with this unquenchable insight, a burning fire in the land of knowing. We are exactly the same as everyone else, we have our failings and we have our doubts, we make mistakes, and we sit and ponder forever are we doing the right thing.

When anyone takes a major life decision, I am convinced that at that particular moment in time time they did it believing it to be for the best. They do it for a better future and in the hope they are taking the correct path.  No one sets out to make their life more difficult or problematic.  Of course our decisions may be ruled by flawed human emotions and by particular psychologies based upon our own unique life experiences and the subsequent world view this generates. Others with their own unique world view shaped by their experience  may of course say well I would do it differently. These are the things that give rise to debates and discussions, places where we open our minds up to other viewpoints and we take what we think is best and that add value and make sense to ‘us’. We ultimately are the guardians of our own standards and our own decisions but these are formed not be trying to ‘know’ a certain answer but by trying to listen to ourselves honestly and by listening to others who we feel have the intelligence and sincere motivation to honestly contribute.

If you speak to anyone who has gender dsyphoria they will tell you of the disruption it creates in their lives. They will tell you of numerous difficulties that lead them to look for a solution to ease a burden they are not sure why they have.  It is not something that goes away, it is not something that one can forget about and it is not something that helps with any particular aspect of living unless perhaps one talks of increased empathy and feminine understanding of the world, which I am not saying is not a blessing. The world could do with much more empathy in it. What I am saying is we have this, that is the only difference to the neutral reader that doesn’t have this. Of course our lives may be different in lots of other ways but in the topic under discussion if you aren’t gender dysphoric then let’s say that is our difference. It would be hard for me to explain to you how this feels and it would be as equally hard for you to understand. I would tell you I don’t know, I am not sure and that at other times I have never been more sure of anything, but I would expect you to empathise with that in some other sphere of your own life. You might say well you either are or you aren’t and I would say of course I am sure I am gender dysphoric, what I am saying is I am not sure what to do about it.  You might then say sure I see you have big decisions ahead of you. Hopefully in that small paragraph I have expressed the minutest thing but also a great thing, namely that as gender dysphorics our lack of knowing is not about what we are but about what we do about what we are.

The variety of things gender dysphorics do about what they are is as varied as each of the individuals that experience it. They do what they do in honest hope that their particular choice improves the quality of their lives. This is sadly often overlooked particular in the transgender community where you either are this or your not this and if you don’t fit my world view of gender dysphoria then you are not truly this or truly that. What a shame this has found roots in gender dysphoric ‘communities’. It is as helpful as burning bibles when people are trying to heal and be understood.

In closing the treatment pathway for gender dysphorics is also about forcing the position of ‘know’ upon us. It says that if you are gender dsyphoric this is the treatment pathway for you, which is funded and how it works. This is terribly flawed and forces vulnerable people into pathways which can lead to poor outcomes as the path to finance is already set based upon a particular range of criteria. The patient walks in and is expected to know and their knowing must fit this pathway. If it doesn’t fit this pathway are you truly gender dysphoric, will you receive emotional counselling and support, do you have to exhibit certain behaviour patterns, will you be denied financial support. All of this continually challenges our own thinking are we right, we have to be right. They tell us we have to know the answer, they even provide us with handy hints to help us find the answer that will access the funding. The answer may be theirs but not ours. The answer may arise from desperate necessity not to go back to the isolation of these feelings. I am in a gender hospital this is where I should be I can’t walk away from this back to the internal silence of my feelings.  I would caution that here most vividly, we see the ‘know’, we as gender dysphorics face for treatment in the UK. If there is one thing psychiatry could do to improve patient outcomes it would be to listen to the individual story, don’t present us with the pathway to ‘cure’ first. Listen to us and together we will ‘know’ how difficult life and how we feel about ourselves is and how fluctuation and uncertainty are far more truly human than the blind certainty we are continually asked to provide.

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