The jazz musician, the celebrated Canadian author, the radical separatist feminist and the boy who cut off his penis so he could play with dolls!

I've been reading again about Billy Tipton. A reading that seems to bring together a number of themes and issues, back to a central point. How our being is appropriated by others for their own agendas, their own agenders.

Who am I? What am I?

I sit on the edge of our bed, ready for work. I reach out my hand, my old, long hand and stroke the silver of my darling's beard, trace the smooth mound of bone behind the soft, fleshy shellcurve of his ear. I look into his deep, nut-brown eyes and suddenly the clock radio comes on, blaring its hard, bright electric words into this soft, dim, draped space.

Something flips over inside my mind and reality shifts.

I'm no longer a discrete, concrete individual entity acting with directed force against an outsicde separate world. I'm nothing, I'm no-one. I'm the shape of everything else from the outside. I am a thousand little invisible people holding up pieces of jigsaw, each piece is a picture of part of what's supposed to be me. I'm not the bowl, I'm the curve of emptiness traced by the inside of the bowl. I'm not a face, I'm the air of not-face tracing the face's features.

I am the end result of everyone and everything that has ever been and is...and everything that has ever happened and is happening.

I am a verb, I am a matrix; a meeting, a leaving. I am the vanishing point of it all.

I kissed him goodbye. I caught the bus.

Billy Tipton had a reality. Now he is part of everyone else's reality.

Here's a hint of Billy's story. I've gleaned it from various sources in magazines and on the internet, especially Diane Middlebrook's biography, "Suits Me: The double life of Billy Tipton".

Billy Tipton was a jazz musician. He died in 1989 after a musical career that was not particularly remarkable compared to the greats of jazz but one which was apparently his great, life-long passion. Billy would, I guess, be just another minor name in the history of jazz but for one extraordinary fact.

When Billy died at the age of seventy-four he was found to have a female body. Subsequently, his story was unfolded, piece by piece. Dorothy Tipton was a keen young girl muso who was told there was no place for girls in jazz. At nineteen Dorothy became Billy and lived as a man 24/7 in every perceivable way until his death a lifetime later. He had had five defacto wives and was father to a number of adopted or step children. Billy disclosed his secret to very, very few people. He retreated from success and from intimacy rather than disclose that secret.

On his death, the attending paramedics thought he was a person who'd had sex reassignment but Billy had never done that.

I first read about Billy in a British lesbian magazine.

You know it seems to me that Billy is a little bit like Sylvia Plath. He's been appropriated in death, in some ways, by lots of different people: "she's" an oppressed lesbian, "he's" an oppressed transsexual, "she's" an oppressed woman jazz musician".

I wonder who Billy was? Being transsexual myself I find it hard to believe someone could live so completely as a man for so long and not be transsexual. But how can I know...really? Billy is dead and cannot speak his truth. Some writers insist on calling him "he", most seem to insist on calling him "she". I don't know what to call him. The only testimony I have is the last 55 years of his life. That's gotta count for something, hey?

Diane Middlebrook, in her book, makes mention of the many women who have, over the centuries, lived as men, sometimes for the greater part of their adult life. Were they all just getting around the proscription against women pursuing men's endeavours (like being doctors or soldiers)? As a woman myself and an avid reader of history how can I deny that imperative? But you know some of these "women's" lives as "men" seem to be so much more than the expedient or the transitory. Bonny Prince Charley donning a dress and bonnet to escape the red-coats is expedient. Fighting for four years and then dying in the American Civil War or living and working as the British Army's chief surgeon for most of your life seems to be of a different ilk, a much different ilk.

But you know, I don't believe it's a case of either/or. Can't all those imperatives - the transgender and the feminist and the lesbian...all have some claim on reality? I've blogged before on my unbelief in watertight essentialist realities.

Sadly, for people like me, there is an essentialist feminist view, still espoused vociferously by some in influential positions that says that not only are "women" like Billy just trying to overcome patriarchal oppression by living men's lives but that "men" like me are trying to rape and invade and appropriate and dominate women's reality by assuming "their" bodies and place.

There's a "kinder" version that says that "men" like me just put our lives totally on the line and risk the loss of our whole livelihood and loved ones and subject ourselves to electrolysis and surgery and loneliness and ridicule and violence just so we can do feminine stuff.

Its 2005, its Australia! There's nothing stopping me from doing feminine. I didn't want to do feminine. I am feminine. I don't want to do woman. I want to be woman. I am woman. Good, bad; live, die. Total. No way out.

Tiny, tiny me who sinks shining into the shining sea of her womanhood, immersed, drowning in joy and pain and glass ceilings and dark night fearing and late night mugging and threat of rape, and reality of rape, my rape by dark, strong men in dark, fast cars and breast cancer and hrt risk and osteoporosis and light and love and children - your children - because my womb is no where to be found.

Who am I? What am I?

You know, by some strange (or not so strange) synchronicity I started to read again about Billy at the same time as I was introduced to Margaret Atwood, whose wonderful, wondeful book, "Alias Grace" I have just devoured. In searching th internet for stuff on Margaret Atwood I came across an interview she did for Mother Jones magazine in 1997. In the article Margaret Atwood talks about her interest in collecting "con-artist stories", citing as an example, the story of Billy Tipton.

Now, of course, Billy's life was marked by extraordinary secrecy and deception. But you know, I wonder about the words "con-artist". Isn't a con-artist a nefarious petty criminal out to take advantage of someone? Is that what we think of Billy? Whatever Billy's motivations and inner reality, and however much he may have decieved others wasn't he also a victim...of something. Wasn't his story sad? So sad?

Billy, the "womanlesbiantranssexualcon-artist".

Would I make a good con-artist story, Margaret? And what would be the con - the before or the after? And who would I be conning - them or me?


Here's some links about Billy:

Diane Middlebrook's biography

A trans* viewpoint

A populist viewpoint

Margaret Atwood's interview

Palm Sunday Anti-war rally

Last Sunday was Palm Sunday. It has become common of late to gather together for peace on this day and increasingly, also, for the various faiths to come forward to lend their voice for peace and for social and economic justice in the face of rampant multi-national corporate greed and heartless neo-conservative machiavellian ruthlessness.

Alex and I joined the throng converging on Hyde Park, Sydney to lend our little voices to the larger voice crying for an end to the lies and the bombing. On the other side of Sydney my 79 year-old mum was heading for Parramatta to join in similar demonstrations, speeches and religious dedications there.

Yep! Li'l Johnny Howard, everyone's favourite Australian "liberal" (ha!) Prime Minister has united diverse swathes of Australia's population against the inhumane and deceitful and fawning policies of himself and his "gang of four". Sadly, a larger swathe of Australians swallowed Liberal party scare-mongering propaganda and so couldn't look beyond the next mortgage payment to consider matters of deeper ethical and moral import before voting in the last election.

But also sadly, Sunday's gathering probably only numbered around three thousand or so. Not much compared to the huge numbers in London and elsewhere in Europe. I remember a Polish emigre I once knew who was appalled at Australians' political ignorance and apathy. Alex and I were at the earlier huge demonstrations of popular opposition to the Iraq war on the eve of invasion but now that expression seems to have dwindled to the faithful few.

And I know that I too am guilty of tokenism and apathy and allow myself to be swamped with the day to day, seemingly overwheming, burden of my life but which by comparison with people being bombed or hacked or starved or infected out of existence is nothing.

I'm glad we went, though. Among numerous political, ethnic and indigenous speakers the staunch pillars of dissent were there - Sister Susan Connelly, Catholic nun and peace activist, Greens senator Kerry Nettle and award-winning jounalist, John Pilger. It was particularly good to hear John Pilger's hard-hitting and passionate commentary as I'm reading his book "Hidden Agendas" at the moment.

I guess the high point for everyone, though, was when Guantanamo Bay detainee, Mamdouh Habib, addressed the crowd to rapturous applause. Yeah! Stick it up ya Johnny! 3,000 people are cheering the so-called "terrorist" in the middle of Sydney. Mamdouh spoke humbly of his gratitude at being out of detention and back with his family. I don't know what he was doing in Afghanistan or Pakistan but I do know what he's been doing in Guantanamo Bay - enjoying US hospitality and civil rights! Not! I don't really know what all these small time guys the Howard government likes to trot out as "dangerous terrorists" really are or do. But I do know that what this government is doing is a thinly veiled attempt to curry favour and push dangerous agendas by being an accesssory to national and corporate terrorism of a far more dangerous kind.

You know, some little man or woman straps explosives to his or her chest and blows up a checkpoint or a building in the furtherance of their ideals and that's "terrorism"; the world's only superpower and its lackies bomb and pillage entire nations with cluster bombs, cruise missiles and depleted uranium (the only "weapons of mass destruction" in the the Iraq theatre) and then sub-contract out control of that nation's ruined infrastructure to corporate buddies and that's not terrorism? Mmm! I don't get it! Oh! Yes I do! Terrorism is when the little guy does it, "defence of freedom" is when we do it!

Carol Christ

Recently I went with my sister and a friend of hers to a lecture by Carol Christ, the American feminist theologian (and thealogian) here in Sydney. I'd been coming across the intriguing (for a theologian) name of Carol Christ (pronounced, I now know, as "crist") for years while delving into various feminist and goddess texts so I was very keen to hear her talk in person.

Carol has been touring Australian capital cities.

Her talk was entitled, "Reimagining the divine" though she often spoke during the lecture of "She who changes - reimagining the divine in the world", the title of her latest book. Essentially she spoke, most articulately and eloquently, on two themes - the possibility of envisioning "God" as female and the significance that could have for women - and also for men - and also on the patriarchal nature of religions and how they diminish and silence women.

This last point was graphically illustrated by the eleventh-hour ban by the arch-conservative Catholic cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, noted for his staunch opposition to homosexuality and to women's ordination, on the lecture being delivered at Santa Sabina, an elite Catholic girls' school run by the Dominican Sisters, who had initially extended the invitation to Carol and the Australian Feminist Theology Foundation.

Now, I don't know about you but my impression these days of nuns, (Catholic, Anglican and Buddhist) is that they tend to be very intelligent, very knowledgeable, feisty women who get out there in the world, with their sleeves rolled up and their minds and hearts open, to make a difference in the world. Of course, I can't know what they think about the actions of a reactionary like Pell but I can imagine that they might not all be supportive.

(Mmmm! A dark nazgul-like shadow just passed over my soul as I recalled some nuns from my early childhood who decidedly did not conform to the above positive image!)

Pell reckoned it was not appropriate that discussion of such topics should take place on Catholic property. I think it was entirely appropriate that such discussions should take place in a women's institution of informed learning and development devoted to producing intelligent, capable, accomplished, spiritually aware young women.

Something else I wanted to say on the "patriarchal nature of religions and how they diminish and silence women" was this: at the end of Carol's talk we had some Q&A and discussion. One man stood up and pointed out that the restrictive, punishing patriarchal nature of much religion silenced and diminished men too. I thought that was an excellent point!

Anyway, it was a wonderful night for me. We ended up having the talk in a beautiful old Uniting church after the other elite girl's school in the area - Anglican - also decided it was not advisable to be associated with the controversy. The church was filled with flowers and candles and had the most beautiful stained-glass windows, one of which was a rendition of Holman Hunt's pre-raphaelite masterpiece, "The Light of the World". Your miss puss did love that!

The audience was predominently, but not exclusively, women and I suppose the most common age group was 40's to 60's although there was a broad range of ages among both women and men. After a while, the packed little church got very hot but everyone seemed very enthralled, I know I was. I must say, being a corporate instructor and presenter, I had forgotten what a LECTURE was like - you know, reading from a piece of paper at a lectern! OK! So when is she going to get out the data-show and Powerpoint, when is she going to start working the audience?!!!!!

Once I got over the culture shock I found her very articulate and very easy to listen to. What she said about the experience of the divine as being cogently and palpably one of femaleness, change and and being integral with life, the earth, the environment and human endeavour absolutely resonated with my own personal sensing of the divine. It was like someone describing publicly my own deeply private spiritual experience.

Oh! Goddess! I am thy handmaiden, guide my every step, teach me to serve thee all the days of my life!

They do say there is a preponderance of ex-Catholics among us pagans! I'm sure there's some truth to the Jesuits' assertion that "Give me a child till (she's) seven and (she's) mine for life". It's just that, while some things might remain for life, a process of change and transformation and evolution takes place. "She changes everything she touches. And everything she touches changes".

Have you ever played plasticene or play-dough with children? You start out with 5 or 6 bright distinct colours and in 30 seconds the little buggers have rolled them up into a rainbow and then a few minutes later it's a grey-brown sludge!). I look for distinct, watertight, essentialist things but I can't find them! All I find is the exhilarating, sometimes scary wheel of constant change and interaction!

To get back to the night, I was privileged to be in the company of some wonderfully intelligent, passionate, fervent women and men who obviously took life and their personal faiths with great seriousness, gratitude and joy. There were some great questions and some great witnesses to people's personal journeys and realities. How could such a night not contribute to the growth of positive, useful thought and action?

As one middle-aged woman in her white blouse and bifocals asked, "Why are they afraid of us?" Why indeed!

Because we - we women and men who seek truth and good - will not allow ourselves to be bludgeoned by neo-conservativeness, patriarchal oppression and soul-destroying fundamentalism - of any ilk - into giving up our faculties of intelligent reasoning and unblinkered observation and our striving for uncompromising honesty and integrity. We will not give up our right to the personal experience of the divine and the extraordinary capacity that experience has to uplift, to scour, to better us - for better things.

My sister and her friend, devout Catholics (but also intelligent, feisty women themselves) felt rather defensive about things after the talk and scurried me off (which I didn't really mind as the alternative was a lonely, scary trip back on public transport). I would have liked to have mingled with that great company of people and pore over Carol's tantalising books, but oh! well! I think my sister and her friend find the notion of thinking of God as Goddess a little bit difficult to incorporate into the rather conventional observance of their religion (Mass on Sunday, etc). I, on the other hand, being a full-blown (if dreadfully lazy and amorphously eclectic), pagan Goddess-worshipper and EX-catholic am already beyond Pell's pale - and loving it!

Please check out the link below to visit Carol Christ's website which talk about her Ariadne institute for the study of myth and ritual as well as her lectures and books.

Penny Arcade

Recently Alex and I went with some friends to Sydney Opera House to see Penny Arcade. Penny is a 50 something Italian-American performance artist from New York who has performed on the edge since the 60's, working with Andy Warhol and Quentin Crisp among others.

She's raunchy, outspoken, unafraid, afraid, passionate, frenetic, challenging, serious, very energetic, very versatile and very funny!

Her show, Rebellion Cabaret, was unrelentingly breathless in its pace and biting in its satire and commentary on everything from everyone's favorite US president to hippies and breasts and GLBT. Oh! And she's not afraid to have a go at herself either!

In between her performance pieces her partner, Chris Rael from the group "Church of Betty" gave us some great music with guitar, mandolin and sitar.

Alex and I were enthralled and fell in love with her. Alex really loved Chris' music too (so did I but I'm more a Patsy Cline kinda' gal). After the show we got to talk to Penny and later we emailed her and she replied. We do both hope to see her again.

The two things she said that most stuck with me were firstly when she spoke about the sad demise of "true" bohemia; how even that great bastion of bohemia, the lower east side of New York had become a bland psuedo bohemia - "Bourgois Bohemia" - like an episode of "Felicity". She quoted a young would-be bohemian she met on the streets of New York who exclaimed, "Oh! I love the cafe culture here - I go to Starbuck's everyday"! Mind you I'm rather partial to Starbuck's myself but I do know what she means!

The thing is I think that although in some way I have always kept true to some sort of bohemian notion of the world I feel that I have always been guilty of a kind of safe psuedo bourgeois bohemianism where I always tried to have the security of a regular job and a roof over my head that was under my name. Oh! well, right or wrong, that's me! I was born with an organic fear centre sewn into the core of my being!

The other thing that Penny said that really resonated with me was something she said on the radio. When asked if she didn't sometimes despair that the state of the world could never be changed for the better, she said that yes, she did despair but that what she thought was that even though each one of us probably couldn't change the wider scheme of things we could ALL change the smaller world around us - our little everyday sphere of influence. Goddess give me the strength to do that!

I do so highly recommend seeing one of Penny & Chris' performances. Well, not if you're of the Christian right or the Bush-Blair-Howard axis of evil (another of her ideas). But if you are someone who treasures truth and compassion and diversity and the incredible richness of life and people in all their difference - PLEASE DO GO AND SEE PENNY ARCADE!

I want to tell you something else about that night. My dearest Alex and I had time before the show for a quick dinner of bruchetta and pasta in a little al fresco cafe on the concourse by the harbourside. As I sat there under the awning I was overcome by the beauty of Sydney harbour at night with all the towering dark glass glinting buildings and the ferries thrumming through the steely water and the cruise ship anchored across the bay at the Rocks and all the lights like jewels and my darling gentle man beside me and around us couples bending low over their cappacinos, sharing their lives and their destinies.

Oh! Yes, I am blessed!

A parting few words of wisdom from Penny:

"If you're feeling depressed and confused, you're on the right track"!

The "Link" below will take you to Penny's website which is under construction altho' it will take you to Chris' site. But here is a little article about Penny.

Pathways To Womanhood

This morning, autumn morning, I leaned against the back door frame, cradling hot coffee, warming my heart and looking out over our early morning yard. How I love it here!

The overbough of the olive tree framing a colourwheel of morning glory, nasturtium, oleander and yellow daisy. The wiregrass glints in the morning sun and dew sparkles the fretted leaves of parsley and thyme in our herb garden. I look in vain for pussies come to visit. Oh! They will still be inside their homes, snuggled down on the back of the couch peering through lace curtains at a world still too cool for their pampered likings. But I know they'll come eventually; curling their furry fox tails around my stockings, plaintively begging for milk! Please, Miss!

As I stared idly at the mossy brick path turning the corner to the side of the house, I became aware of its linear pattern leading me on irresistibly in its chosen direction. I seemed to have no choice but to follow its lines and breaks up to the back steps and around the corner to...who knows what awaits!

Oh! This was one of those zen moments, haiku moments! Ahhh! I purred, Significance!

I did a lateral mind shift and thought of Professor Susan Greenfield's passionate ravings about the brain and also, in the same moment (because I always link these two), about my assertion that a transsexual woman's claim to womanhood originates not in some essentialist, suspended-in-the-ether, mystical "womanness" that exists beyond time and body and society but rather in the pattern of neurological structural and functional meanderings that are laid down in her brain from before birth and on into early childhood and beyond.

A neurological pattern that is similar to the neurological patterns of non-transsexual females in many significant respects and which includes the much-touted bed nucleus of the stria terminalis - the supposed neurological seat of our gender identity. I believe this female-typical neurological patterning leads the child who will become transsexual woman to identify with other females (whose outward behaviour stems, at least in part, from their own neurological patterns), to find resonance with the behaviours and interests and the expressions of the thoughts and feelings of other women and girls. And because of this deep-seated identification with the females in her world the transsexual child cannot invest the same degree of commitment to learning male behaviours and thought patterns as male-identified children do. Consequently, the male behaviours she learns as survival techniques or just through sheer frequent exposure reside precariously in an outer assumed male persona which has only tenuous links to her core sense of self.

Now I think that once the base neurological structure and functioning is established, probably through a combination of genetic predisposition and hormonal levels in utero, there takes place a building upon the base structure in the same way that a crystal formation will grow by replicating upon its initial structure and in the same way that forensic archaeology builds up the likeness of a person's body from their exhumed skeleton.

Of course the transsexual child can be exposed to all sorts of behavioural and societal and physical elements in his or her environment so the subsequent neurological structure and functioning can be of any shape and style. This I think helps explain why some transsexual children say, "I am a girl (or boy)" and others say, "I want to be a girl (or boy)", why some transition at 20 and some at 80. And why some people will have surgery and live completely as the sex they identify with and some people will take less complete steps to express their inner sense of being female (or male) or may do so only on occasion.

No! I don't believe there is some essentialist, suspended-in-the-ether "true" transsexual any more than I believe there is some essentialist "true" suspended-in-the-ether man or woman. We are, all of us - transsexual and non-transsexual, an incredibly convoluted, interwoven, ever-changing hybrid of nature and nurture, "male" and "female".

So, what does this have to do with my mossy brick path? Well, if I have a neurological pattern of female and I live in the close company of other people (mostly non-transsexual) who have the same female patternings I am going to be led down a path of recurring, persistent thought, feeling and behaviour which will lead me as irresistibly and as "naturally" to womanhood as any female.

Is a gumnut a gum tree? Is an acorn an oak? No! But each seed contains the blueprint or roadmap that will, given the right conditions of air and water and food, lead irresistibly to it growing into and upward to being a tall and upright and fruitful tree.

At the age of four and a half I stared out at a world that beckoned me to its female and feminine side. Can we really believe that children of four and five could be so perverse or so bloody-minded or so warped as to contrive this; to maintain this, in some expressed or hidden form, for their entire lives? Surely something more fundamental and integral and natural to their being has taken place. Something expressive of the extraordinary capacity for diversity and survival inherent in life.

I could have no idea that at that time I was on the pathway to womanhood. A long and, at times, perilously convoluted, pathway but one which, nevertheless, has led me surely and irresistibly to this moment.

Click on the Link below to read an article about Professor Susan Greenfield