Categotry Archives: travels with CL

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Me and My Vagina, Special Anniversary Edition: Part II of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, me and my vagina, my pussy my self, teh tranz, travels with CL

Today is the anniversary of my surgery. In fact, as I type this now, I am about a year removed from my first full day of having a vagina–Thailand being twelve hours ahead of my local time, and the six or more hours of my surgery having started at noon Bangkok time. (I don’t remember how long the surgery lasted, as I slept through it and for a long time afterwards, only waking up for a brief moment to say goodnight to my significant other of variable and often fabulous gender.)

In fact, there’s almost a week of time that I have very little recollection of–the five days I had to stay immobile in bed, according to my surgeon’s regimen. Not everyone does this; had I gone to the Canadian surgeon I first considered, I’d have been up and walking around after about a day or so. Everybody does things differently. But I’m somewhat glad for being immobile; during that five days I only moved once, and that was because I’d thrown up on myself the first day after my surgery–juice boxes and opiates don’t agree all that well. The only way to get me clean sheets was to move me to an entirely new bed. Which meant I had to crab walk over to it. Now, even under normal circumstances, that would be both uncomfortable and ungraceful; but I had to not only contend with the pain from my brand-new down there, with the attendant catheter and surgical drains, but since I’d also opted to have my boobs done at the same time, I could barely move my arms; the surgeon went in under my armpits, and to be honest that pain was more omnipresent and inconveniencing than the other.

But other than that, and my SOOVAOFG saying goodbye to me to fly home–we’d spent ten days together bumping around India and Cambodia prior to my surgery, and vacation time is precious nowadays–I really don’t remember much. I slept a lot; I was too out of it to even watch TV. Every so often, they’d bring me a thick creamy soup and some juice boxes to eat and drink. I rarely ate the soup, but I drank the juice. (As an aside, Thai sweets of all kinds tend to be sweeter than American sweets–probably because they use real sugar.) I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t so much that I was drugged out of my head–Thais don’t practice American pain management, and I didn’t even have a morphine drip–but because nothing changed. There was me; my bed; my room with the blinds drawn; and the occasional ministrations of kind Thai nurses who spoke little English. (My Thai was suspect at its best and no match for my pain and grogginess.)

But eventually they packed me up and sent me home, after giving me a huge, cumbersome, old-fashioned bra. It was trimmed with lace and looked like something from the “18-hour bra” commercials I’d seen as a kid. And then I was dumped back in my hotel room, just me and my catheter bag–they didn’t take the catheter out until the next day, which was a little scary and gross. On the other hand, it was pretty convenient for lying in bed and drinking stuff, which was about all I was up for.

But it’s surprising how quickly you can heal. I was moving around the hotel room that, night, had enough energy to make breakfast the next day, and even hosted a pizza party for some of the other patients of my surgeon a day or so after that. (We had a couple of these affairs. They were interesting; we’d have a great time for about an hour, and then everyone would be in too much pain to continue. But they were fun while they lasted.)

That was all a year ago.

Things have changed. For one thing, I now only have to dilate once a day for about 30 minutes. That will mean I can actually get up at the same time but still get to work earlier, which will help me have more time and energy to write in the evening. I’ve had sex, by which I mean–this being America and all–PIV sex, so now I know how much I’ve been missing. My recovery has been remarkably hassle free, even with the UTI I developed a month after getting home.

There’s more, of course, much more. But how can I put it all in words? There are days when I forget that I never had a vagina, and there are days when I forget for a second that I do. There are many days when I am astonished by the miracle of it all, and many more days when I simply take it for granted. And most of all, I feel like what I am supposed to be. I feel like a woman.

And I felt that way before. I am not going to play pussy politics with you and engage in zero-sum games about the proper anatomy a woman needs. It’s reductive, and cruel, and ignores the economic reality of far too many trans women.

But there’s no question that I like myself better this way, that I feel a peace with my body I never felt before. That I had to wound myself to heal.

Not that I’m completely healed. None of us, I suppose, ever really can be–and I’m not just talking about trans people. If we measure lives by ideals, then we’re all a little broken, all in need of some kind of healing. And I’ve come so very far.

But there are still times when I resent that passage; when I resent all the things that were taken from me, all the things that I never had–even the bad things, even the things that in a sense I was fortunate enough to miss: if I feel the omnipresent judgment of every damn TV commercial on how I should look, act, think, and feel simply because of my gender, can I really long to have had that drummed into my head from the moment it poked into our world? Do I really feel sorry for myself for not having spent three and a half decades as a victim of sexism?

No. Not really. But I do regret the necessity of it all, the long slow struggle to find out who I am, the summoning up of awful reserves of energy just to survive each day, and then the ultimate effort to make myself into the person I desperately needed to be. And so I regret that passage; but I am grateful, oh so very grateful, to have survived it.

And you could say, maybe, that my vagina is a symbol of that: a physical manifestation of not just my womanhood, but my struggle to achieve that womanhood, a signpost showing how far I’ve come and how much I had to undergo to reach it. I suppose that would be fine; I’d hardly be the first woman to eulogize my vagina, and I doubt I’ll be the last, cis or trans.

But I don’t really do that much. Because most of the time it’s just a vagina. And believe me, that is more than enough. In fact, it’s perfect.

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Cahiers Parisiens: les derniers jours

Categories: kyriarchy, paris notebook, travels with CL

My last three days in Paris, I went to museums twice; since on Tuesdays most of the museums are closed, I stayed in and worked that day. (Pity, it was another beautiful day–but at least I went out and had some Senegalese food that night. Chicken Yassa is incredibly yummy!)

That Monday I went to the Louvre. Because, as I said last time, you just have to. Since I’ve been sharing my favorite paintings with you, I guess I should include my favorite painting in the Louvre not named La Gioconde (or the Mona Lisa, if you’re feeling vulgar, heh.) It’s by Caravaggio–I just love the voluptuousness of his canvases:

It’s an astonishing work, although I understand why the monks who commissioned it ended up rejecting the painting–there’s absolutely nothing transcendent about it at all, except for the all-too-human transcendence of grief. No halos (well, just a tiny one), no angels, no heavenly light, just a corpse and mourners. Amazing.

Then Wednesday, my last day in Paris…I wrote a post that you may remember, then headed out to the newest museum in the city, the Musée du Quai Branly. This is an ethnography museum. (We call it history if you can beat us in a war, and ethnography when you can’t.) And it’s a stunning place: beautifully designed, with a wonderful garden surrounding a modern building with a pleasantly chunky, open interior. Of course, given that it’s an ethnography museum, everything is done up in shades of brown and ocher, with plenty of shadows and dim lighting; c’est normal.

I don’t want to run the place down too much, because it really has an amazing collection. But there were amusing moments. If you follow the suggested path, you start in Oceania, and right at the start they have a lot of items having to do with the initiation into the various men’s societies that are a rite of adolescence in New Guinea. And I was reading one of the placards about these rites, which mentioned in passing: “women’s societies are known to exist, but very little is known about them.” Which surprised me–not. Because I’m sure the male anthropologists were a) not able to gain access to the rites and b) really didn’t care too much, either.

I get bitey sometimes.

The one part of the museum that truly stunned me, though, was a temporary exhibit on Tarzan. Being of an occasionally pulpy mindset, I thought that might be an interesting thing to see: especially because there’s certainly a lot to be looked at in the Tarzan mythos, and how it relates to Western perceptions of Africa, and African perceptions of those perceptions. And while there does indeed remain a lot to be said, this exhibit sure the fuck wasn’t going to say it.

Oh no, ducks. Instead, it started out comparing Tarzan to the heroes of ancient Greek and Roman myths, and actually went downhill from there. There were plenty of blown up pages from Tarzan comics (continuous salient feature: Africa had a lot of people in it, but almost none of them were black–there were lost Romans, lost Egyptians–drawn as Caucasians, natch–lost explorers, lost elephants, but damn few not-lost-at-all-because-we-live-here Africans.) There were video exhibits of King Kong (uncommented upon: the, uh, racism?) and in general an astonishing avoidance of the fact that the Tarzan myth is about a white English lord who rules over a kingdom of black apes. No metaphors for colonialization there, no sir, just keep on walking!

And of course this is–surprising? Maybe not really?–for a country that once claimed a significant portion of sub-Saharan Africa as its territory. And has remained uncomfortable with that legacy ever since.

That chewed up most of the day. For dinner, I went to a bistro called Boullion Chartier in the 9th. It was recommended by my exchange mate as a very traditional French bistro–so traditional that they actually keep track of your check by writing it on the tablecloth. Since I was alone, they seated me with somebody–the place was empty, but it fills up quickly. He turned out to be a montréalais who spoke excellent English, so I had one last anglophone conversation in Paris over my steak au poivre and profiteroles. Then I went home and watched the last episode of Heroes, Season 1: my exchange mate had a copy, which I was able to switch over to English, except for the subtitles for the Japanese characters; those I had to read, quickly, in French (and French as it’s spoken, at that: but now I know that Je l’ai reussi! means “I did it!” in French.)

So that was my Paris sojourn, my attempt to find out what it would be like to live in the City of Light. And I think I succeeded; it was a good fit, though I recognize to really live there I’d have to truly immerse myself in the language and not spend so much time in self-created anglophone spaces. And of course I found privilege there, expected and unexpected, much that was the same as home, and a few that were quite different.

But you knew that already; heck, it’s really not even fair: I always find privilege.

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Cahiers Parisiens: Tout le monde parle à moi

Categories: adventures in transition, paris notebook, travels with CL

Bon jour, mes canards! Paris may be a fading memory, but I will try and catch you up on the last few days of the Cahiers Parisiens.

Maybe it didn’t come through, but I didn’t talk much with people while I was in Paris. This is not that unusual. I work either from home or at a desk marooned at the other end of the floor from everyone else; I don’t often go out to bars either home or in Europe; and in general, I am a misanthropic sour puss. This helps out in the writing game, but isn’t so much use in other places.

But…well, the last few days in Paris I actually had some interactions with people.

The first couple happened on Sunday last. I went up to the Canal St. Martin, which is a hip spot to hang out nowadays. The canal is indeed quite lovely, and they close off motor traffic along it on the weekends. I stopped at a little cafe (amusingly, when I asked for the menu, the waitress brought an enormous blackboard with the specials written on it out to my table.) While I roasted in the sun I wrote the first draft of my long screed below. (I had what amounted to a mess of egg over good country ham with some sort of vinegar sauce–it was fabulous.)

After brunch I walked over towards Buttes Chaumont park, one of the gems of non-tourist Paris, a magnificent landscape of hills, crags, and a lovely lake. Here’s a picture of the grotto in the center of the park:However, on the way over to the park, I had my first experience with…Latin lovers.

I was crossing the street when a young Tunisian guy (as he told me) came up to me to tell me how pretty I was. Which was nice of him, but I kept walking. He followed me, and we struck up a bit of a conversation in French. Admittedly, I was a bit lonely, which let me fall into the trap of talking with this guy, something I wouldn’t have done in English. And of course, he got a bit grabby as the conversation progressed. I did finally manage to extricate myself (after a bunch of “arretes” and “ma relationship est grave!”) but it left me slightly shaken. And of course this all flows into my background as a trans woman: should I be worried because I don’t have the experience that would have helped me learn the skills to deflect guys like this, or relieved because I haven’t spent my whole life deflecting guys like this?

Later that day, as I was walking home (baguette in hand, of course), another guy came up to me and began to talk rapidly in French to me. I couldn’t really follow him, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was after. I let him down firmly but gently: “S’il vous plait lassez-moi suele.” (Please leave me alone.)

And oh! On Monday, I went to pay my respects at the Louvre (you have to see the Mona Lisa while you’re in Paris…you just do.) And as I was walking to the Metro, another guy wanted to “make my acquaintance.” This time I just said I didn’t speak French.

But the best story has to be when I was walking home from the Louvre on Monday. I passed a store I had previously seen, and just had to snap a pic, because…well, because the sign is a rather weak joke:

The name of the store is Les Bonnes Compines which in French means something approximately like “The Good Girlfriends.” Fair enough…but it’s written with out the space between Les and Bonnes, making it look a bit like…something else in English.

As I said, a weak joke. I’m not proud

Like most of the stores in that region of Paris, it’s a wholesaler–I had basically landed in the Parisian garment district, with “Ne vente pas au detail” (wholesale only) in almost every window. And for some reason, when I took the pic, a woman in a telephone booth (yes, they still have them there) started to scream at me.

I couldn’t follow everything she said, but it was mostly about how I shouldn’t take a pic. I tried to explain, but only got as far as Parce que…(“because…”) before she started to scream again. She even spit on the ground. Eventually I just walked away…I guess she thought I was some sort of corporate spy or something.

Shows what you get for acting like a tourist; I should know better.

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Cahiers Parisiens: ce qui vous tenez, ça c’est ce que je prends

Categories: invasive kyriarchy, paris notebook, privilege stories, travels with CL

I’ve finally escaped my Catcave the last several days, making my way out to a few museums I hadn’t visited before. First was the Musée Carnavalet on Friday, down in the Marais. Carnavalet focuses on the history of Paris itself, and has dioramas, objects d’art, paintings, etc. from various time periods. They also had a special exhibition on the French Revolution, which engaged the military historiophile and the Francophile in me: the Revolution is one of my favorite time periods, and they had a wealth of stuff. Including some of the commemorative models of the Bastille that were actually carved from the stones of the Bastille itself.

Plus I discovered that I could read the Declaration of the Rights of Man in French. Score one for me.

I’ve been eating lunch rather than dinner the last several days, since lunch is cheaper, so I had my traditional, once a trip croque monsieur at a nearby cafe, washed down with some Haut-Médoc and a cup of strong French espresso. I’ve taken to drinking coffee in the French style after meals–espresso, with some sugar to cut the bitterness. It makes me feel all expatriate and such. Though I suppose I’d really need to drink some Pernods in a bar with a zinc counter top, and scribble furiously away in my notebooks about running the bulls at Pamplona and other homoerotic displays of masculinity.

Wait. That’s not me. That was Hemmingway. Maybe I’ve been drinking too much wine.

Saturday I had a real treat…well, not an unproblematic treat. But you’ve probably come to expect that of me. I went to the Musée Guimet, over by the Trocadero. This is the main Asian art museum in Paris. I didn’t go straight there, acutally: I had a large lunch nearby first, which included a desert of profiteroles–cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream and drenched in chocolate sause–my favorite desert in the world, and something that it is almost impossible to get (at least, impossible to get done right) back in the states:


Anyway, the museum really has an excellent collection, from all parts of Asia. The India collection was quite good; and as someone that has been interested in Shiva since my days researching Indian mythology, I was happy to see this marvelous bronze of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance:

They have an excellent Cambodian section. As I’ve been to Cambodia this year, it was quite pleasant at first to reacquaint myself with the amazing and monumental Khmer art–to see one of the gently smiling, inexplicable faces of the Bayon silently contemplating me again, to look at a marvelously preserved naga, to see a beautiful bas-relief apsara.

But something began to bother me. When I would read the labels to see where these things came from, I began to feel…uncomfortable. That’s because I’ve actually been to those places; I’ve seen the elephant terrace, the royal palace, the Bayon of Angkor Thom. And given that Cambodia was a French colony for ninety years, I thought it was a pretty good bet that they didn’t ask if they could take any of those things.

This isn’t a new issue, of course: the Louvre has the best egyptology collection outside of Egypt, because of Napoleon’s conquests there; the British plundered the Greek world to build their amazing collections; even within Europe itself museum collections are often the plunder of war.

Still, the enormous gap of wealth, privilege and power between the colonial nations of the nineteenth century and the countries they subjugated seems to lend an air of disquietude that doesn’t linger over the internecine push and shove of Europe’s long shabby history of warfare. Because they essentially stole these things from people who found it difficult or impossible to resist. Stole, and left no recompense, and often no regrets. Even the great humanist Andre Malraux got into the act, trying to steal artifacts and whole bas-reliefs from the newly-rediscovered and beautifully-preserved Banteay Srei in Cambodia.

Of course, it’s nice that people in other places in the world can see these things, and it’s good to have some of them safe in a museum–the Angkor artifacts suffered during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. But that still doesn’t make up for the crime of taking them in the first place. I mean…they could have just asked.

In any case, maybe it’s appropriate that this guy, donated by the women of the United States in the memory of Lafayette, should be right outside the museum:

(Yeah, that’s good ol’ George himself.)

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Cahiers Parisiens: les Autres, les Etrangres, le Moi

Categories: all about me, kyriarchy, paris notebook, travels with CL

Last night I was having a somewhat dismal (in Paris, that means it was actually decent) meal over on République when I think I saw the mostly iconic image of 21st century Paris I’ve ever seen: a guy on a rented bicycle, smoking a cigarette as he rode down the boulevards.

Paris, of course, has an uncomfortable relationship with the modern world. It retains it’s preeminent place in the world of fashion, is a major political and business center for Europe, and remains the center of gravity of the francophone world. And, of course, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

But so much of that comes from its curious sense of being frozen in time: the perfection of the nineteenth-century vision of Good City Life, the architecture frozen in place, the parks looking almost identitical to the images on the canvases of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s static the way New York, my other favorite city in the world, never is: New York reinvents itself every day, in a furious pace of rebuilding, modifying, reconsidering, reconfiguring. Paris sedately glides by, asleep in the long belle rêve of Haussman.

Sometimes I think only Paris’ status as the capital of a major country in Europe keeps it a living city. That, and the changing face of the French world.

I am staying in the Oberkampf district, on the northeastern edge of the city. I’m guessing it’s going through a gentrification cycle; it’s close to the Marais, the former Jewish ghetto that has become not only the heart of gay and lesbian Paris, but the home of most forward-looking fashion designers. It’s an area of former factories being transformed into a residential district.

Out here, not quite in the periphery (let alone the banlieues, the suburbs that ring Paris), I still see more people of color than you do in central Paris, tourist Paris: Africans and Berbers from the old colonies, Indians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabs. It makes me homesick and feel at home at the same time, resembling my ethnically mixed neighborhood in the Great American Metropolis. (Also a rapidly gentrifying area with great restaurants.)

I won’t rehearse for you the litany of troubles the changing population of France has brought on: the difficulties in assimilating different ethnicities into the French self-conception, the poverty and racism and rioting in the banlieues, the fact that the President of France once threatened retributary violence on those same rioters, before he was elected. France bans the veil at school, championing the cause of secularism and human rights, and we are left with profoundly mixed feelings about exactly what liberties are being abridged, and who has the right to do that. Etre Muslulman en France, screams the headline of one magazine I see advertised: being Muslim in France. What is it like, I, they, wonder, to be marooned in a culture that regards you cautiously, obliged to help you because of the mythic ideals of its own past, but not sure how to come to terms with being more than it was in the past: plural, multiple, different. How it is to be Other until that happens, if it ever does.

I could claim some parcel of this terrain, as both a woman and trans, but I really doubt it’s the same: here, as in America, the swath my privilege as a white, able-bodied, educated person cuts through most hindrances.

Still: Tuesday night I went to an aikido class. The dojo has a very different style compared to my dojo back home: much harder, more concerned with proper form than movement. A good experience, but too much like my original aikido dojo for my taste.

I’ve talked about my French being better on this trip, but the truth is, it’s still very weak, comparatively. I can read it passably well (today I was reading the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” in French and getting most of it), but anyone who speaks even moderately fast will have me in the dust. So, when the teacher would explain the technique, I would be…lost. I have almost no vocabulary for body parts: no word for wrist, barely able to recognize “leg” or “knee.” I would get a word in every so often, and occasionally a general sense, but for the most part I’d be lost, and have to rely only on what I could see.

Which is the best way to learn, actually. But in those moments…I was the other. I was the one lost in a sea of incomprehension, struggling to use all my wits to figure things out, almost mute, ignorent. (There are times I grow so frustrated with how I speak, because my mind leaps so far out in front of what I actually know how to say: and I know I must sound stupid, with my mangled syntax and wonky accent.) And this is a valuable lesson to learn, to hold to myself the next time I get frustrated with someone else.

We never learn more about our privilege than when we are called on it. Or made to see the other side of it.

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Cahiers Parisiens: À faire vôtre conaissance, je suis ravie

Categories: beauty mythology, o mores, o rapites, paris notebook, the male ogle, travels with CL

Désolée, mes canards! Sorry, Ducks! Been an odd few days–an exhausting theory fight on a board I belong to, and general exhaustion! You see, it would seem that I did an apartment exchange with a French person who only drinks tea. That’s right! No means of creating coffee in the apartment except a jar of instant coffee. Which I was actually desperate enough to use.

So I’ve been drinking tea. Now, I know that the UKians in my audience will think this odd, but tea doesn’t wake me up, or at least not enough, not like coffee. And I think I’ve been going into serious caffeine withdrawal, which has completely messed up my sleep cycle. So today’s big accomplishments–on the day I needed to do a solid day’s work to get back on track–was walking down the Boulevard Voltaire to a kitchen appliances store where I got a tiny french press to make coffee with. And after I’d had a pot, and took a long nap, I finally am feeling human again.

So anyway. Do you like puns? do you like obscure French puns that only make sense in English! I do! I’ve named two blogs after that way, and the title of this post! Which I will explain below.

On Monday I went to the opening of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Venetian Rivalries at the Louvre, thanks to a ticket my exchange mate scored for me. I’m not a huge fan of the Cinquecento, but there’s obviously some insanely good stuff done by these painters, so I was happy to go–plus sailing into the special exhibition hall in the Louvre was pretty posh.

The show has some really good paintings, and they are really beautiful–though I agree a bit with Michelangelo’s critique that the Venetian painters placed color over drawing skill. (It’s okay; you can make the same criticism of my favorite painting in the world, which has some awkward bits–look at the way the arm kind of hangs out there in the foreground.) And as I walked through the exhibit, two thoughts came immediately to mind:

A) These guys painted real women! Take a look at the centerpiece of the exhibit, one of Titian’s most famous paintings, Danaë:

It’s astonishing to contrast Danaë with media images today–her breasts, hips, thighs, arms–and look, she even has a bit of stomach. And she’s a gorgeous, idealized image of femininity; this is what women were supposed to look like.

In fact, she looks a lot like Lizzi Miller…the plus-size (size 14) model:

Although she’s hardly idealized, at least by some people:

So what do you think? Does Lizzi Miller look fantastic or is this lowering standards for stick thinness industrywide?

(For a little more intelligent discussion, see this Below the Belt post.)

However, my appreciation for this fact was kinda mitigate by my next observation…

B) This exhibit is a little…rapey

OK, a lot rapey.

I mean, the signature painting of the exhibit–the afore-referenced Danaë–depicts, well, the rape of a woman by Zeus. Oh, and did I mention that she had been kidnapped by her father and locked up to prevent her from having a kid? I know the Greeks weren’t really big on happy stories, but still.

In fact, and I guess sort of to it’s credit, the exhibit has a whole couple of rooms about the ways nudes are depicted in the arts of these masters. But even that was a bit problematic: wall to wall naked women, offering themselves up to men, or the male gaze, or alone by themselves (letting you gaze voyeuristically at them.) And in one room, there were five separate treatments of the Rape of Lucretia. Which is a lot of rape to have in one room, even if the paintings themselves are exquisitely decorated.

So that takes me back to French puns.

One of the things you say in French when you are introduced to someone is Ravissante à faire vôtre conaissance. Now, ravissante means ravished; and in French, this is basically only used in the way we use the English word ravishing, that is, beautiful.

But it comes from the same roots and same sense as ravished in English: to take, to carry off…to rape.

So that’s why I flipped it around in my post title, one translation of which might be: “to meet you, I am ravished.”

I don’t mean to say that in French you say that you’re raped when you meet people. That’s not what it means anymore. But it is an artifact of how rape, how the principles of rape–that a woman’s body belongs not to her, but the men who look at her, who can take her–pervades every corner of our culture. You can see it art; you can hear it in language; you can feel it in the way men look at you, or in the long lists that people send you telling you how you can avoid being assaulted–because assault is an implacable force of nature, not the acts of people with the moral capacity to make decisions.

But hey, don’t believe me. Just ask Tucker Max!

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Adventures in Transition: Édition française

Categories: adventures in transition, travels with CL

Bon jour, mes canards! I’m spending the next two weeks here in Paris, doing the apartment exchange thing (there’s some value to living in the Great American Metropolis–people want your place!) I hope to report on le feminisme and transness here in France, and also make some of you green with envy.

More later–I splurged on a traditional dinner (vegetable soup, confit de canard, crème caramel and 50 bloody cl of wine) and need to sleep it off.

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Adventures in Transition: Édition Internationale

Categories: all about me, i get around, travels with CL

A dear friend of mine recently had her GRS done up in Montreal. She’s had a long history of complications from surgery, and sadly this was no exception–so yesterday her son and I hit the road and took a seven-hour road trip up to visit her. (It would have been six hours, but I always get lost–also, asking a truck driver for directions to a gas station when you speak a very imperfect French is a wonderfully Dadist exercise.)

She’s doing a little better today, and was surprised and pleased to see us, so I’m very glad we were able to run up here.

It also reminds me of a few things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve visited Dr. Brassard’s clinic; I came here last spring, when I was considering using him as my surgeon. (I ended up going to Thailand when I decided to have more things done; it cost the same to go to India and Cambodia–and fly home via business class–as it would have cost to have everything done in Canada.)

Back then, I still wasn’t sure when I would even want to get surgery; it wouldn’t be until the fall of that year that it would take on a sudden urgency. I ended up hanging out over the weekend with a few of the patients who were waiting to have their surgery done–there was a very pre-op vibe.

Appropriately enough, thios time all the patients are post-op, the last group of surgeries before the clinic’s summer vacation. And it carries me back to my own early post-operative days, the camraderie between me and the other patients who were staying at the hotel. (We had two pizza parties while I was there, and generally hung around in each other’s rooms for a while; I also met the nicest person in the world there, a trans woman who had made the trip on short notice to be with her friend who was having the surgery.)

I don’t use the word comrade lightly, either; we were like any group of disparate people thrown together by a painful shared experience–we bonded fairly tightly while we were together, but our natural differences pulled us apart afterwards. I’ve seen so many different takes on what we went through: from people who convinced this was the most important and transformative experience of their lives to grim-faced agnostics like myself who were convinced that nothing important would change after surgery. (I was wrong, though not necessarily about what the surgery did to me; it was how I felt about myself afterward that was the radical difference.)

The residence where people stay to recuperate here is quite pleasant, and is another what if place for me: because this is more or less what it would have been like to stay here had I done my own surgery here. In some ways, it would have been easier–on the same continent as my family, and my French is about eleventy-million times better than my Thai (and my French ain’t that great, so you get the picture.) Not that I regret my trip, because I got to finally see India and Angkor Wat, and even use my French when talking to Frenchwomen in Thailand for their own surgery. But it is kinda nice to make it up here and see what it would have been like.

Meanwhile, I’m worried about my friend, but happy as well to be able to be up here for her. Send her some good wishes if you can.

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The Second Awakening: Special Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, silly blather, travels with CL, your rda of misogyny

Welcome again, ducks! Today’s post comes to you live from Amtrak! I am on my way to visit my parents, and as we are a Green outfit here at TSA, we’re riding mass transit. I am writing this on my trusty blue Acer Inspire One, which I bought for the trip to Thailand and has become my indispensable travelling companion–it fits in all my purses, and with the wireless broadband modem, I can blog anywhere!

Speaking of that trip, I passed through a large swath of Asia during it, and in honor of the first post I’ve written at 50 miles per hour, I thought I’d share some impressions of sex roles and segregation I gathered on the way.

Our first stop was Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. We only were there to transfer flights–if you’re flying to India or Thailand, I highly recommend Etihad Airlways; they spare no expense, the planes are comfortable even in coach, and the food was actually good. But even that brief layover gave me a sense of the character of the place. There were women working, but mostly as servers; the salesmen we saw at the various stores were, well, men. Abu Dhabi is a crossroads in the Persian Gulf, so we saw all varieties of dress, from full burqas to women in completely Western dress. (The flight attendants on Etihad, though, wore these odd combination pillbox hats and veils.) The bathrooms were a bit different; there was an attendant/chaperone, and they follow the British custom of having full-own rooms with doors instead of stalls.

One definite difference: the metal detectors were sex-segregated, to make sure that you were only touched by someone of the same gender. (This was to be a recurring theme, we shall see, and one that usually left me pretty worried.)

India: Saying anything authoritative about India is an excercise in futility; it’s too big, too varied, too everything. Our tour was exclusively in the northern part, so there were more Muslims there than other parts of India; again, there was a lot of variety in how Muslim women dressed, though when we visited the Jammu Mosque in Delhi, I saw quite a few people in burquas.

Indian standards of modesty are different than those found in America: bare bellies are fine (and an artifact of wearing a sari, as I know now–I bought two), but shoulders and knees should be covered. Both my boyfriend and I had to don ceremonial, wildly-patterned caftans when we visited the Jammu Masjid; once again, the metal detectors and clothing attendants were strictly sex-segragated.

Indian business and commerce are far more completely dominated by men than I was used to. We did meet several businesswomen, but almost exclusively in hotels; in stores, and the various “local craftsman” factories we were taken to by our guides (so we could be browbeat for 20 minutes in the hope of buying a rug/inlaid marble table/block printed cloth–the guide got a commission, of course), the people who did the talking were always male. As were all our guides; come to think of it, I think all the Indian guides I saw were male, as were a majority of the servers in restaurants.


Plate 1: The Author contemplates that the most beautiful building in the world was built for a dead woman.

Moreover, the quintessential picture of Indian poverty, I am sad to say, is a woman with her children. While I’m sure I saw some men begging–I certainly saw many, many poor people of both sexes; in India, if a space is flat, somebody’s living on it–the people who approached us were almost universally women. (On the other hand, the people who tried to sell us overpriced trinkets while we waited on various lines were exclusively male.) Every public bathroom I went to in India had an attendant; I’m not sure if that was always true for my boyfriend, but it was for me. These were very poor women (or heartbreakingly, little girls) who handed you a napkin to use to wipe yourself in exchange for a small tip; we usually gave them 50 ruppes, around a dollar. I can’t speak with any sure knowledge, but I would hardly be surprised to find that these women were Dalits.

On our way out of Indira Gandhi Airport (the first place I ever saw a traffic jam of luggage carts), we once again were run through sex-segregated metal detectors. These were more elaborate than the ones in Abu Dhabi; you were in a completely screened-off area, where you got wanded by the guard. Of the proper sex, of course.

Perhaps nothing captures the attitudes I encountered in India better than this: I was the one who booked the trip, who paid for it, who had negotiated with the tour company. When we arrived in Delhi, my name was on the card the tour representative held up at the airport exit. Yet when we got in the car–I was sitting right behind the rep–he turned to my boyfriend and said, “So, sir, is this your first time in India?”

Invisibility and being pushed around by men were the hallmarks of the trip for me.

Cambodia: Once we left India, we noticed a marked change in the presence of women in business–in that we actually saw several. Men still did most of the jobs that involved talking, including guide to foreign tourists. Like India, my boyfriend was spoken to first and more often.

I have no idea what the rules for the separation of the sexes are in Cambodia, but there seemed to be something subtle going on around us: our guide, Mr. K, constantly talked about the pictures of the apsara, or dancing girls that you see in bas-relief everywhere on the Angkor temples. He was often wistful about it, whispering: “Aspara. Dancing girls. Very beautiful girls.” We suspected dating was pretty complicated in Cambodia.

Plate 2: Mr. K wants you to know he feels nothing for these women. Nothing!

Thailand: We passed through Thailand twice, actually: once, very briefly, on the way to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and then of course of the Purpose of the Visit. Thailand, least in Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport is huge, and more modern than LAX or Newark Liberty; if not for the presence of signs in Thai, you’d hardly know you weren’t in America.

Plate 3: It’s like Los Angeles, just with worse traffic.

In Thailand we finally saw something approaching gender equity. Women were firmly entrenched in the workplace, at about the same proportion that you find in America. Men talked to me–sometimes even first!–and women were definitely assertive, at least to me.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a lot of sexism; there was. Thai (or at least Bangkok) culture has something resembling a mix of 50s-style mores, plus a thousand years of Buddhism, plus modern capitalistic ruthless. My nurses told me, for example, that it was still considered somewhat risque for women to smoke–I mean, holy Mad Men!

But at least in Thailand (and Cambodia) I could pee by myself; there weren’t any bathroom attendants. And the metal detectors were unisex.

This is the face of progress, ducks: a man being wanded by a female security guard.