reading pagan kennedy's The First Man-Made Man
pg8... Sir Harold, as the patients called him, understood that recovery had as much to do with the mind as the body. Some of the patients at Rooksdown were so disfigured that, even with the best care, they would remain outcasts for the rest of their lives. Such patients had to be encouraged to relearn the art of happiness, which is why Sir Harold banished many of the rules that make hospitals such grim places and coaxed his charges into dancing the fox-trot, growing zinnias in the garden, or venturing out into the town surrounding the hospital for a beer. As a result, Rooksdown became the kind of place where, even in the middle of the night, you might come across a one-eyed man teaching himself to ride a bicycle down the hall. Or a burn victim wearing blue toenail polish. Or a surgeon pouring a pint of human blood into the tomato patch. "This was no ordinary place," Sir Harold wrote, with typical understatement.
pg15... He insisted that homosexuals belonged in a completely different category from transsexuals. A butch lesbian might be able to hide out in a dress when she had to, to masquerade as a feminine woman in order to survive. But for a woman who knew herself to be a man, no such option existed; she had to stride down the street with a male swagger, had to wear a blazer. Transsexuals, he wrote, "have the most difficult life of all, for they cannot conceal their forms from curious eyes...Their peculiarities are forever being forced upon them by the thoughtless persons who gaze after them and loudly voice the question, 'Is that a man or a girl?'" Homosexuals, at least, had the closet. Transsexuals did not. They were always on display.
pg22... For all of us--transsexual and not--being misperceived, wrongly identified, or erased is one of the most terrible things that can happen. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to gender. To be taken for the wrong sex is to be blotted out, to be mis-seen in the most vital way. Worse, perhaps, is the sense of not fitting together, of your insides not matching your outsides.
pg15... He insisted that homosexuals belonged in a completely different category from transsexuals. A butch lesbian might be able to hide out in a dress when she had to, to masquerade as a feminine woman in order to survive. But for a woman who knew herself to be a man, no such option existed; she had to stride down the street with a male swagger, had to wear a blazer. Transsexuals, he wrote, "have the most difficult life of all, for they cannot conceal their forms from curious eyes...Their peculiarities are forever being forced upon them by the thoughtless persons who gaze after them and loudly voice the question, 'Is that a man or a girl?'" Homosexuals, at least, had the closet. Transsexuals did not. They were always on display.
pg22... For all of us--transsexual and not--being misperceived, wrongly identified, or erased is one of the most terrible things that can happen. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to gender. To be taken for the wrong sex is to be blotted out, to be mis-seen in the most vital way. Worse, perhaps, is the sense of not fitting together, of your insides not matching your outsides.