Visible Man: True Spirit 2002

Jamison Green offers a man's POV on life in the trans lane. Opinion, advice, and information from an internationally respected leader of the FTM community.

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Since 1997, the "True Spirit" conference has taken place every February in the Maryland/Washington, D.C. area, drawing female-born transpeople and their significant others from all over the U.S. (and beyond).

This conference has always especially appealed to young, gender-queer people, and unfortunately it has managed to become a target of the religious right in the past year or so. Two articles focusing on the trans "horrors," trans-educational, and sex-positive aspects of the conference recently appeared in the Christian publication "World Net Daily" (read the article here), and there are probably more damaging pieces to come.

As these forces train their sights on any one part of our varied trans population, they endeavor to cast aspersions on us all. In response to those who would inhibit all of us in the name of God, I'd like to share more widely the words of support and encouragement that I offered to the 500-plus attendees at this year's conference, centering around the conference theme: "Letting Our True Spirit Soar."

The idea of letting one's True Spirit soar is, to me, about the freedom to be who one is. There are many ways to understand our own True Spirit, and for some of us one primary path is through gender. When that is the case and we bring our personal understanding of our own gender -- and what gender means to us -- into our awareness of our own body, we can begin to know the nature of our own True Spirit.

Being who we are, or being ourselves, is a lot easier said than done. It only seems easy because it's self-defined. It is easy to say, "I know who I am, and you don't have the right to define me. Only I can define me." That's true. But being able to say those words doesn't mean one is completely conscious of "who" he or she is, or even completely aware of one's self.

Indulging in the freedom to go socially beyond or outside the gender notions (norms and otherwise) that other people have tried to cram down our throats can be very satisfying. But there is more to contacting our own True Spirit than simply defying or breaking down other people's norms or expectations. When you know the truth about who you are, things become easier. It doesn't mean that all battles stop, or that all obstacles disappear, but you can experience a feeling of relaxed satisfaction, an ease in the world that is like time stopping, and nothing else matters for an instant. Then, as you move through the world from that point forward, you can carry with you a sense of clarity that is the lightest burden you will ever have.

The life force that is in each of us is something powerful, and not to be trifled with. Because we are social beings, we all have the power to affect the lives of others. Our freedom to express ourselves and to exercise our civil rights comes packaged with commensurate responsibilities, particularly the responsibilities to honor the freedom of others and to do no harm. It is easier to meet those responsibilities when we come from a place of balance in our own lives, from a place of contact with our True Spirit. Letting our True Spirit soar is the ability to be one's self, and freely allow others the same courtesy.

For so many of us, gender is a trap, a prison, a constricting web of boundaries, lies, deceitful pretenses, roles that don't fit, expectations that we can never live up to. But gender can also be a confirmation, an expansion, an expression of self that is so much a part of us that we cannot imagine self-fulfillment or real intimacy without it. And yet real intimacy can so quickly go beyond gender, once gender has inspired it. Gender is a path to intimacy, but it is not always intimate. Gender is something that is perceived from the outside and interpreted by others, so it is not always something we are in conscious control of or that we can own completely for ourselves. Yet it is also something that no one else can always see, something that is deeply felt on the inside and that may or may not be expressed by each of us in its entirety or full complexity.

Because of society's limitations in its comprehension of gender, it's possible that we may see (or experience) conflicts when we are presented with someone we perceive to be (or when we have a sense of ourselves as) a masculine woman or a feminine man. Or, depending on our politics, we may be critical of a feminine woman or a masculine man. But knowing our True Spirit, and knowing no one else can know our gender the way we each do, we can let go of the kind of demands that others place on us and that we might otherwise be tempted to place on others. We can be fully ourselves, and we can allow others to be fully who they are without judging them or worrying about how their presentation, appearance or behavior reflects on us.

That freedom of self and freedom from concern about conformity, whether it's conformity as genderqueer or gender-normative, is a real liberation from the kind of pressure to measure up and/or to be or assert one's self as superior to others. Removing that kind of pressure from our lives frees up a huge amount of physical, emotional and spiritual energy that otherwise would be brought to bear down upon us, dominating the way we spend our time and the psychic space in which we spend it. Transitioning or otherwise living on the gender edge is demanding enough without beating ourselves and each other up on account of our differences.

This year's True Spirit conference was another chance to come together in celebration of the truth of our lives and in support of one another. Whether your focus is on gender, or race, or class, or ability, age, religion and spirituality, sexual orientation or any combination of these major social issues that affect us all, I hope everyone at the conference was able find the information, the inspiration, the confirmation that she or he was looking for.

Too bad the critics can't get past their homophobia and transphobia to realize what's going on in our brave new world. We could agree to disagree, but I expect they will prefer to continue to battle it out. I'm not sure how we ought to prepare for this, but we should certainly be aware that we are on their radar screen.