Wednesday, November 20, 2013
In which I become a trans foreperson of a jury. And other strange but commonplace adventures
Last week was so strange. I’ve never had a week like that before...but then I’ve never been on a jury before.
There is so much about the process I had simply never thought about or taken the trouble to understand.
How time consuming it all is, for a start. I’d had to phone on the Sunday night, and then again on the Monday, and then again on the Tuesday.
And then finally being told to turn up again at 12 on the Wednesday.
And then, after waiting around for 40 minutes, being sent away till 2.00.
And this was something else I had never appreciated or understood: that so many more people are called than are actually going to be needed. And that the selection process really is random, with our numbers being picked out of a glass jar.
And so this strangely assorted grop of fifteen individuals who were finally crammed together in a jury room, all of us feeling uncertain and out of our depth, were absolutely the product of chance.
And so was the case we were called on to adjudicate.
And how lucky we were: it was short and it was comparitively easy. We were not exposed to anything especially traumatic; and we did not have to exert ourselves to establish exactly what happened.
It was all there on the CCTV. (Something else I had not appreciated: how detailed CCTV images can be. And how intelligently and skillfully they can be handled).
In all those ways we had an easy time of it. The main thing we were called on to do was use the evidence we were given to interpret what we saw and try to find the most appropriate words to describe it.
But that was difficult enough: language is slippery at the best of times, and the law, in trying to pin it down, imposes definitions on words that makes them different from their normal use.
And these words really mattered: they could have a profound effect on the life of the individual being judged.
And top of that, being called upon to judge a fellow human being is a hideous and a stressful thing.
Something else I had not appreciated: how difficult the work of juries is. How important it is. How, like so much else in our society that really matters, it is generally unrecognised, unappreciated, and unrewarded.
I was reminded again how much I live in a bubble most of the time. I stick to what I know I can do and I stay with social groups I know will not be hostile.
Simply because my situation is a vulnerable one; and certainly last week I had worries about how it would be for me as a transwoman in this unfamiliar world.
It made me so much relaxed about the whole situation when I was able to come out, and be open about who I am. And then me being trans didn’t stop me being chosen as the fore-person of the jury.
Which makes me wonder how extreme the hostility must be for so many of us for stealth, concealing our true identities, to seem like a safe and viable option.
And it makes me glad that here in Scotland, at least, we are gaining acceptance. And that the world has changed.
Meantime we had to keep going back into the court room, which seemed frozen in time: always the same avuncular man in the powdered wig, the same tense and self-conscious young women in their legal mannerisms and their gowns, the same bored security guard. The same defendant, staring straight ahead, pale, tense and afraid.
It must have taken us about three hours to decide. It was a difficult and yet oddly hopeful process, trapped as we were in the cramped room in this nightmare building dedicated to slowly grinding its way through so much human malice, stupidity, cruelty and suffering.
I was touched by the way the group of us worked together to try to decide what would be just. Touched by the trouble people were prepared to take to make sure the right thing was done and the right words were used to describe the defendant’s actions and the conclusions we had reached. Touched by the way care was taken to make sure everyone’s voices were heard.
I felt sorry for the man; it seemed to me he had simply been the victim of very bad luck, and been caught up in a situation so way beyond anything he had ever experienced before. And which frightened him profoundly.
And the way he responded may have been wrong; but wrong in a way it was easy to understand, and wrong in a way that almost anyone in the same situation would have done exactly the same.
So, rightly or wrongly, I felt an intense reluctance to convict him on a criminal charge. But also, rightly or wrongly, I was completely overruled.
And so at the end of the day I had to deliver to the judge a verdict I didn’t altogether agree with.
But which at the same time had been part of a collective process. And yet there was comfort in that. In knowing that it had had to be a collective decision: the product of a group working together to reach a decision in which my clemency and other people’s harshness all had a voice.
The judge interpreted our verdict in an intelligent and sensitive way, and it was reflected, somehow, in the sentence.
I've always been pretty cynical about our justice system. And yet somehow at the end there was a feeling among all of us, me included, that even in so imperfect a system justice had somehow been done.
Labels: courts, criminal, jury, justice, transsexual
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Performing in the Bloody Great Border Ballad Project
About half a million years ago, which is to say at the beginning of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, I chaired a very lovely event called “The Body Politic” at the Traverse.
It was organised by the Playwrights’ Studio (http://www.playwrightsstudio.co.uk/) and featured four extraordinary writers/performers whose work, like my whole life, explores the politics of the human body:
Claire Cunningham http://www.clairecunningham.co.uk/
Robert Softley Gale http://www.softley.co.uk/
Claire Dowie http://www.clairedowie.co.uk/
Adura Onashile http://iron-oxide.org/current-projects.php
I think it important at these events to give the audience the chance to explore the issues with each other. And just before pairing them off to take turns to listen and talk I spoke about how when I was living as a man I was taught to ignore my body, to use it as a tool, to ovverride its signals of distress, overcome its weaknesses and “be a real man”.
And how now, living as a woman, I find myself and my body exposed to a huge multi-national industry that employs all its massive resources and considerable skills to make me feel rubbish about myself.
All of which has been very forcefully brought home to me by watching a video of my performance in Northern Stage’s Bloody Great Border Ballad Project at the very end of the Fringe:
It’s a lovely project, I am so happy to have taken part in it, and I am sure it’s a lovely video too.
I simply cannot bear to watch it.
I hate the way I walk. I hate the way I stand. I hate my shape. Hate my dress, hate my hair. Hate the sight of myself.
So I stopped watching because I am very proud of what I did and don’t want to spoil it.
It is a sad world that puts so much skill and effort into making us dislike ourselves. And which also, to an extent, so often and so brilliantly succeeds.
When I first transitioned I know I didn’t feel this way.
I so enjoyed the fact that when I looked in the mirror I recognised myself. Properly recognised myself for the first time in my life.
And liked myself too.
And I know that when I lived as a man i could never have performed the way I did last night.
I was too divided against myself to be properly present on stage.
The way the project worked was that Aly Macrae wrote the first (very lovely) verse of the ballad, which was added to every night by a new guest balladeer.
I had to turn up last Thursday to see the show, with the ballad up to that point,, and then had the Friday to write my verse and prepare myself to rehearse it at 8 and then perform it at ten.
My bit of the rehearsal felt like the first readthrough of a new play. It’s a tricky moment: you know your fellow professionals are the first audience you have to win over.
So there was a certain tension in the air. And yet I knew with perfect clarity what I was going to do. And I knew it would work.
And it did.
I felt completely at home; and I felt like I completely belonged.
As I did all those years ago when I was still a boy and went into a rehearsal room for the very first time.
All those years ago before performing got all tangled up with my understanding that I would be so much happier if I could live as a girl.
Before it all got tangled up with the most hideous fear and the profoundest shame.
For many years, this fear and this shame completely blocked my capacity to perform and left me stranded and struggling with a profound isolation.
One aspect of this isolation was that it left me unable to sing. I hated my voice and could not use it. Not with other people around.
There was a lot of music in the show, and a lot of singing too which we rehearsed. In the past this was always a source of dread. But now I found myself joining it with a total unselfconscious pleasure. Loving it, in fact.
Perhaps even for the very first time.
That’s how I know something very profound has happened to me.
So I post this to say thank you to Northern Stage, whose open-hearted generosity of spirit and whose artistic vision made it happen. Made something very special happen, not just for me, but for their audiences too.
And I post it also as an act of defiance: against all the acts of self hatred that so often the world makes us complicit in.
As an act of resistance.
As all my work is...
Labels: Northern Stage, the beauty industry, transsexual
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
In the hospital again
I’m thinking of my version of Celestina. Of the speech where she talks about old age:
CELESTINA Old age is an inn of infirmities, a hostelry of sad thoughts, a friend only to bitterness and continual grief. Old age, lady, who could describe it? Describe its aches and inconvenience, its weariness and cares, its diseases, its cold shivers, its hot flushes, its rancour and discontentment, its misery and grief. The wrinkling of the face, the greying and thinning of the hair, deafness in the ears, blindness in the eyes, the hollowing of the eye sockets, sinking of the mouth, toothlessness of the gums, feebleness in walking, lack of strength in lifting, slowness in feeding.
MELIBEA Mother why do you speak so much evil of a state so many so vehemently desire to attain?
CELESTINA They desire a glut of suffering and travail. They wish to reach old age because it is sweet to live and as we live we grow old. So the boy wishes to become a youth, and the youth a man, and the man an old man, and the old man wishes to become older still, for all the pain of it. And all for the sake of living.
I think of it because I’m on my way to the Western General hospital to visit my mother-in-law and the passage very beautifully expreses her desire to go on iving. Whatever the cost.
And I think of it because that show opened in the King’s theatre in August 2004 as part of the International Festival and it was sometime between the dress rehearsal on the Friday and the opening on the Monday that we learnt my partner Susie was to die of a brain tumour. Also in the Western.
And so the journey to that hospital is always a fraught one for me, full of grief and anger and dread, and at the end of it I found Jean sitting up in a chair in the assessment unit, a bit semi-detached, not altogether sure how she got there, but still interested in the goings on about her, still taking a keen interest in the soup she’ll get for her tea, hoping it’s better than the brown stuff she gets at the care home, proudly pulling up her nightie to show off how well her skin graft is healing, the one she had to have at her last time in hospital (only a very few weeks ago). Still talking about how much she wants to get the operation to have her cataracts fixed, still hoping she’ll get her walking better again...
My being transsexual upsets her, so she ignores it; just as she ignores the fact she is slowly dying. She treats death with utter disdain, absolutely acts as if she were not present. Holds onto her love of her great grandson and her granddaughters and the view from her window and the flowers that grow on her window sill.
And I’m sure I would be able to be more encouraging if it didn’t hurt me to be so constantly referred to as her “son-in-law John” and if I didn’t have death’s words ringing in my ears.
Death’s words to my Ines:
INES
Who are you?
OLD WOMAN
A friend.
INES
I don't want to know you.
OLD WOMAN
No-one does. They're all the same. Go to my neighbour, they
say. Keep away from me. I say, I don't want your neighbour. Yet. It's you I'm after. They say get away! Get away from me! But they've got to sleep, haven't they. Everyone's got to sleep. So I creep in and takes away their sight. Not all at once, that would be a waste. But bit by bit, so the world gets darker. You've got to start somewhere.
And some of them dig in their heels. So I'll take away their money
& their livelihood. Their dignity. Their little pleasures. I say, come on, you don't need any of these. Not where you're going. You've
got to give them up sometime. So why not now? And they say not yet. Not yet. Give us a little longer please
And I say I'm only an old woman. Come on. Don't you be scared of me. What are you frightened of? I don't mean you any harm.
And don't think you're special, don't think you're being singled out. I come to everyone
& if they still resist I'll sit on their chest. How their hearts flutter. Or take away their minds. Or break their bones. Some turn yellow.
Others blue. Some of them do thresh about. Sometimes I fill their chests with water and they drown in it. They call that a quiet death. They call it dying in your bed. People hanker after it, when they live in violent times. More fool they.
The harder they hang on, the harder I've to pull, you see. Its not that I'm vindictive.
You'll have more sense. I know you will. You worried cause
you're young? I think you're better off myself. You don't want to get old. Believe me. I know old bodies. I creep around inside. Heaps of rubbish everywhere. And the smell. Of cause, you gets used to it. But you don't want to go through that. You still smell sweet.
I have to leave her in the end, as you do, and as i walk away i feel exhausted, somehow as if I have lost a little of my will to live.
The sun is shining and it’s hot and the streets are full of a rare and sticky kind of contentment.
But I see death everywhere; I see the older people, like Jean, like me, engaged in the lifelong invisible implacable struggle against their dying. I see the death of a society that knows its way of life is founded on injustice and excessive consumption and cannot be maintained and yet which cannot change.
But I’ve no right to criticise or condemn Jean, that old lady so full of dignity, still, and so indomitably brave.
But I know I don’t want to die like that. Die in denial. I want to learn to learn look death in the eye. Learn how to die well.
Die well in order to learn to live better.
Labels: dying, Old age, theatre, transsexual
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