Many Genders, Many Butterflies, Mary Poppins

By D. R. Yonkin, CSW

“From… the recent discovery inspired by the Hubble telescope that there are at least 50 billion galaxies, our traditional ways of seeing and existing are being challenged…. And just as chaos theory in the nineteenth century disrupted reductionistic and mechanistic views of the universe, transgender theory as we near the twenty-first century is shaking up reductionistic and mechanistic ideas of the ‘known’ body we live in. Fixed ideas of gender bipolarism are wavering, forging a revolution on bodies and consciousness that embraces their complexity. From this new vantage the emergence of at least 50 billion galaxies of gender becomes a distinct possibility.”

Gordene O. Mackenzie, 50 Billion Galaxies of Gender: Transgendering the Millennium. In Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle (Kate More and Stephen Whittle, Editors).

A most beautiful quote, the above, written in 1999. Besides beauty, it conveys the truth of greater glories to come, in ways that can’t really quite be grasped—although there are fingertips near or upon realities that modern technology and society are able to slightly open windows and doors upon. The Universe is no longer a windup machine of some inhuman master deity, intent on punishment for failure to find the key that will keep it running—it never was that kind of toy, but that was how people came to see and believe and become somewhat stubbornly fixated in. Now, the Universe is experienced as Consciousness, and the more Consciousness, the more Universe there is to experience.

The trans experience can be perceived as a living art experience, far ahead of its time, like Picasso, or Pollack, or Bob Dylan, or the Lescaux Cave Artists, and far ahead of socio-technology’s own tentative grasp. Until the new godling, “MedTechSci”, learns to relax a bit, loosen its tie, let go, the butterfly of trans experience will continue to be battered and bruised at great expense—by a science that thinks it can make butterflies out of caterpillars, the same science that would have us believe that some people are caterpillars to begin with.

As I’m a transpositive therapist, a number of people who believe they are caterpillars have gifted me with their time, presence, courage and stories—and pain, lots of it, every colour of the rainbow, if pain can be a rainbow—seeking answers, support, a way out of the frozen hell the Organizers code as “depression”. Most people wear multiple masks, usually every second of their lives, layers of them, blurring and shielding the never-ending child beneath. Yet there’s that one expression always there, evolved over a lifetime of pain from an interrupted metamorphosis, and showing through all these “caterpillar” visages. This expression is not a mask—it’s Truth. This Truth, which has no voice at that point, conveys in its expression all the words a child knows before it can speak: “See me, accept me, understand me, and love me.” I don’t know how much it matters that I’m a “therapist”—another label, really, but I do know how much it matters that my own face reflects back their Truth.

There are people who view a Pollack painting as anything but art, rather as unfinished, incomplete, a mess, to be ridiculed, perhaps destroyed. The Organizers labeled it as a form of “abstract expressionism”, and because they could make a profit, turned Jackson’s best efforts at trying to convey the expressions of an exquisite pain, quite beyond their ken, into something to objectify and collect. These reductionists and mechanists, whom Citizen Mackenzie refers to in the above quote, cannot or will not understand, much less accept, the reality of intense pain that so many persons experience when their inner gender experience runs contrariwise to their outer sense of body and space. These scientists, these tinkerers, are the same ones who prefer to dissect a butterfly in order to add to their collections of organized conceptualizations about how it got that way, rather than just seeing it, accepting it, understanding it and loving it.

This organizing, conceptualizing, theorizing, labeling, of trans-truths and trans-beauty disturbs me; this method takes, rather than gives. There is no law that the Ten Thousand Things of the Universe must be named, must have a label. Labeling is a rudeness that refuses to simply ask, “How might I greet you?” Contrary to popular myth, Adama and Evian didn’t get to name all the new beings arriving into existence around them, hence getting to be in charge of them—It was much more exciting, loving, authentic, to simply ask, “Besides Beauty, what other names might you have?”. The asking allows more beauty to arrive, and in this way, labels, when self-expressed, become the bearers of infinite galaxies of expression and being, but only if there is complete freedom. Where there is complete freedom, infinite labels can come and go as they please. The Universe loves to be asked, to be thanked, to be given gifts and to gift back.

While recently completing a practical contribution to academia—the “trans chapter” in a text book for graduate social work students—it seemed at first to be cosmically significant, even an honour, that I could present contemporary, non-pathologizing words, terms and phrases to contemporary, helping-minded people, thus contributing to “forge a revolution on bodies and consciousness”. Then, after labouring away for mind-numbing weeks trying to find a way to continue that thought in the section on “theories”, I realized two things. One, that I’m rather a non-theorist. And two, that if you keep saying the word “label” quickly and over and over again, it starts coming out sounding exactly like “blah, blah, blah”. Try it and see. The label is not the thing itself.

Somehow, I’ve reached a personal realization, probably helped along by an otherwise useless but fun degree in art history obtained many years ago, and a more useful, fun one in painting, that theories about trans attempt to accomplish the same thing theories about painting try to do: cover them up; obfuscate them while remaining convinced they’ve been “explained”. Theories are ideas, not the paintings. Theories accomplish nothing after the fact that the painting accomplished everything. Theories can be lots of fun, even if taken seriously, since there’s always someone around to make fun of them. They provide a lot of entertainment for many people, and on many levels. I’m just not a very good candidate for being drawn into the kinds of academic ankle-biting that goes on in “transgender identity development” circles, unless perhaps I get to wear an impressive hat.

When a human creature in pain is sitting across from me, and I see the one or more masks, usually on top, the expressions of which intimate, “Why am I the way I am?” or “What’s wrong with me?”, or “How did this happen?”, I cannot offer a theory, nor a label, or hand them another mask, to cover up the pain. I get asked those kinds of questions a lot, and I’m always reminded of the scene from the film “Mary Poppins” that made a worlds-shattering impression on me at the age of eight. After Mary’s big, exuberant, magical dance with the chimney sweeps all over the neighbourhood roofs, down the stairs, through the parlour and out into the street, Mr. Banks, the head of the house, demands, “Will you be good enough to explain all this?”, to which she replies, “First of all, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. I never explain anything.”

And interestingly, mysteriously, I find that repeating “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” over and over quickly never comes out “blah, blah, blah.” It is what it is.