Wednesday, March 23, 2005

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

1 Comments:

Blogger Paula said...

Thankyou!
You know at the age of four or so I knew some things had best not be said. I gagged myself for 40 odd years. There's little girls (and boys) just like I was out there right now - alone, oh! so terribly alone. I owe it to them - and to me to inform people, to challenge people, to try to change things. Its scary - I'm still a little girl inside. I'm waiting for someone to rouse on me - really, really badly.
And, hell, I just like the sound of my own writing!
I treasure your words and your interest. Love, Paula.

8:45 pm  

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