Being Amber Rhea

At WAM!, in the book proposals session, Courtney E. Martin said, “Write the book that scares you. Write the book that you needed to read.” When I heard that, my heart leapt to my throat. Her words have been resonating in my head ever since.

My comments at the time, in my liveblog, were:

Eeeek… that’s why I started the SOTS Forum site… but of course, I recently shut it down (though I plan to restart it as a Google group; a lot of that was because I broke it and couldn’t figure out how to fix it). But also, it just started feeling too detrimental to be hanging out in that place that I had passed. Maybe that sounds selfish… but that is how I felt.

Maybe one day I will feel like writing that book. I don’t know.

One of the other panelists in that session (don’t remember who, and apparently I didn’t liveblog it) said she firmly believed that everyone in the session has a great book in them. I don’t doubt that I do. It’s the getting it out part that’s terrifying. And not just because of this part (another quote from my liveblog), though that’s certainly part of it - and a passable excuse, if nothing else:

A lot of people talk a lot about writing a book, but actually doing it is a huge sacrifice of a lot of other activities. You have to spend a lot of time just sitting in a chair, writing.

And, last relevant liveblog quote for now:

Courtney: “The book that’s inside of you may be the book you don’t want to write.” It may be the thing that feels too painful, or pisses you off, or is too real or too personal.

She wrote a book about body image. She says she never wanted to write it, because dealing w/ body image issues had been so painful for her.

I can relate… more than a few people have said I should write a book about significant others of transgender people. And I don’t disagree… I mean, I *could* write a good book about it, and from a perspective that hasn’t been done thus far. But I just don’t know if I want to. That stuff, even though I’m “over it” in some ways, in other ways I just want to leave in the past and not think about.

Okay, now I think I’ve sufficiently set this thing up.

As mentioned above, I started the SOTS Forum site in December 2003, and ran the support forum there until earlier this year. Part of the reason for shutting down the forum was that I did something stupid one night while mucking around with FTP, shell access, and god knows what else, and basically deleted the entire database (or at least the message board front-end interface; I still don’t really know). But partly, just like the line about sitting in a chair and writing, that was a convenient excuse. Don’t get me wrong - it’s very true, I don’t have the time, necessary technical prowess in this particular area, nor the disposable income to pay someone what they would deserve in order to fix my fuck-up. But I’ll be honest: I had been thinking of shutting down the board for a while.

I didn’t really want to shut it down, wholesale. I wanted to pass it onto someone else who would take over as admin, webmistress, etc. Except nobody was stepping up. And I had been distancing myself from the board for a long time: posting only occasionally, and mainly just taking care of behind-the-scenes issues like combating spam. The reason - and even though I know, logically, it’s not “selfish,” it still feels that way and I feel guilty - was, to use a phrase previously used by a cisgendered* partner of a FTM in California who was a lifesaver of support for me in the first few days following my discovery: “It was getting too detrimental to wallow in other people’s pain.”

I was glad the board was there - hell, I created it specifically because of the glaring lack of support resources for SOs at the time when I needed it - but every time a new member would join and describe her (it was, 99% of the time, her) pain and agony, it was like I was reliving all of that misery, yet again.

I created the board because nothing like it existed. I created it to be the support forum I needed. And now, should I “write the book that [I] needed to read”?

Let’s face it, that book still does not exist. First of all, there are only a handful of books out there by SOs of trans people at all (some are mentioned here, and even with that list, I was reaching); and the ones that do exist are mainly of the “my partner transitioned but I stayed with them and it was tough and here’s how we did it” variety.

Which is great, and those books serve a purpose, and speak to the people who need it. But what I always got from those books’ existence, and more significantly the lack of books by the partners who didn’t stay?

Well, it was the same thing I got from the online support forums “for transsexuals and their partners” (the “and their partners” glommed on as a superficially-inclusive afterthought):

“If you really loved her**, you’d stay with her.”

In so many words, and not. I got it both ways.

And, too:

“Think about how she must be feeling! It’s so much worse for her!”

This is when I truly learned the importance of safe spaces.

The board - especially the “SOs only” area, visible only to those to whom I granted access - was sacrosanct. There was no accusatory language, no projecting, no trying to turn someone’s life falling apart into a teachable moment. There was no judgment. If you decided not to stay with your transitioning partner, it wasn’t because you didn’t love them enough, or you were transphobic (that was the accusation that always galled me the most), or you weren’t willing to stick it out through hard times (Religious Right anti-divorce rhetoric, anyone?) - it was because you were doing what was right for you. What a concept.

I wish the board existed, now, in book form. I want the details spelled out - the process of going through the five stages of grief (because in many ways, it is like mourning a death), trying to keep up external appearances while your world crumbles from the inside, the self-doubt and self-loathing and self-hatred and second-guessing and all the rest of it. I want the affirmation spelled out in all caps, underlined, italicized, bold:

You are not a bad person for not staying in a relationship with your trans partner!!!

I want that book to exist. I know the ability to write it is in me. Part of me wants to, but part of me feels resentful that someone else hasn’t already done it.

And, anyway: I think I’m still too scared.

—

* We never used that term on the board; I guess because no one knew it?
** A big no-no: using female pronouns when I’M NOT READY TO HEAR THEM. Hello, my life crisis is NOT political; do NOT make it about YOU.