Monika: Do you often experiment with your makeup?
Chrissie: A dear friend who is a makeup artist for film and a college tutor in makeup, gave me a few lessons on how to use my makeup. It made a huge difference and gave me confidence. I often get complimented on my makeup skills, but I'm never sure if that's a 'back-handed' compliment? I tend to use the style of makeup and absolutely love Urban Decay palettes.
Monika: By the way, do you like being complimented on your looks?
Chrissie: I think this is a loaded and sometimes painful thing for us to experience as a transwoman, I think we ask ourselves too often, if the compliment is 'genuine', or whether it's because a woman is trying to be kind, feels sorry for us, is trying too hard to affirm us and make us feel at ease, or even if they are patronizing?
I guess now I just take compliments at face value, soak in them, and not try too hard to work out their motives in complimenting me. What I do enjoy is the feminine culture that does genuinely like to build others up, encourage them and affirm them. I enjoy complimenting others and always try to be honest and not false in my praise.
Monika: Do you remember your first job interview as a woman?
Chrissie: I'm in the middle of the transition, still work as a builder, but I have been to see a few prospective clients as myself; transfemme. The women seem absolutely fine with me turning up on site en femme. Most men seem to struggle and seem to be ill at ease with transwomen in my experience. And I nearly always pick up their unease and insecurity.
As transwomen, we totally mess with their sexual polarity, they have my sympathies, lol. The men who are totally at ease with me are rare, but nearly always become very close friends, or already are so.
Monika: What would you advise to all transwomen looking for employment?
Chrissie: Be yourself. Striving and trying to be what you are not, turns people off. The gift of being trans is authenticity and honesty, and that's what people love about us from my experience; it allows them to be real, honest, open, broken, authentic, instead of having to constantly prove they have 'all their shit together'.
Monika: Are you involved in the life of the local LGBTQ community?
Chrissie: I'm more involved in advocacy for LGBT+ community within the church, where I am active and busy. I've recently joined our town's local LGBT+ group, but lockdown restrictions during the pandemic have stopped us from meeting up or doing much. I hope to get more involved if we can get this virus under control.
Monika: Could you tell me about the importance of love in your life?
Chrissie: My whole life has been driven, motivated, and sustained by the search for love. As a child, I was miserable, melancholic, prone to despair, and most likely depressed. Being aware from a very early age of being different, 'other' from other boys, experiencing rejection, bullying, mockery, and living an isolated life, left me with a craving for love, to be loved, to find love, acceptance, affirmation, yet being trans I hid in shame, suffered continual suicidal ideation and self-hatred.
I didn't discover until after I came out, at the age of 55, that I suffer from attachment disorder, amongst other things.
That dysfunctional craving for love led me into a very dark place, alcohol dependency, drug addiction, and the brink of prostitution.
In my late teens, I believed my greatest need was probably for a spiritual answer, as much as a human one - that human love was temporal, fleeting, and worthless to trust in, but that there must be a spiritual, or divine solution. I fled the red light district of Earl's Court, London, and prostitution, for India, a spiritual search for love. I practiced yoga and Buddhism. It ended in disaster, opium addiction, and begging on the street.
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| "My biggest desire is to be more loving. Love for me is the essence, source, and nourishment of all life." |
Monika: And what saved you?
Chrissie: I had an encounter with Jesus. On being flown home, a broken, skeletal mentally ill addict, going through cold turkey, mental illness, and agoraphobia, I read a little Gideon's New Testament and fell in love with Jesus.
I've been trying to follow him ever since. In Jesus, I feel connected to divine love, even in the darkest times - and there have been some very painful experiences I have lived through.
I am married, and we have two amazingly beautiful daughters. My wife and I are still together, seven years on from my coming out as trans. Our love transcends the physical limitations of love and sexual relationship, it's a deep deep friendship and love. I guess having two daughters really taught me what selfless love is. I feel a total failure as a husband and father, yet I know I have given my family my best, that's all any of us can do. I love them with my whole being, but I'm not always able to show, or give them love in the ways they most need it.
Monika: What is your next step in the present time and where do you see yourself within the next 5-7 years?
Chrissie: My biggest desire is to be more loving. Love for me is the essence, source, and nourishment of all life.
My inner motto is, 'Let love consume me - burn me up until I become love'.
But I guess you're asking about my physical transition?
What if I transition and I still suffer all the gender dysphoria and dysmorphia?
Unlikely I know, given all the evidence and the lives of all my many friends who have transitioned fully and are flourishing.
Yes, of course, I would transition tomorrow if I could. That, however, for now, seems an impossibility, our National Health Service is broken - in terms of being able to fulfill my desire and need to transition.
I face a probable seven-year wait to access surgery. We don't have the money for me to go through private health care.
More than that, I don't see the transition as 'MY' transition, but something that my whole family would have to experience, and to some degree, suffer with me, even if only in the social hostility thrown at us.
So, I hold my life lightly. I could be dead tomorrow. Am I going to waste my life being miserable because I don't have the opportunity to physically transition, or is their hope for people like me, 'stuck in no man's land?'
I want my life to be a message of hope to others, whether I get to transition or not.
Don't get me wrong, for me, living with gender dysphoria and dysmorphia is a total shit-fest, it can be hell and I will fight till my dying day for the right of trans people to transition - maybe that's where I find my strength and comfort, in fighting for all the trans kids who follow on behind, let's make this world a better, safer place for them, so that they can flourish and not experience the hell our generations have had to suffer.
Monika: What would you recommend to all transgender women that are afraid of transition?
Chrissie: Probably everyone suffers some fear in transition. Transition covers everything, from coming out, to completing all the surgery you believe you need to become at peace in your own body, to find a new place and role within your family and community, but does it ever stop? As humans do we ever stop growing? Can we ever say, 'That's it? I'm done?'
I think fear is something we all have to learn to live and work with.
What works for me, might not work for someone else.
That said, I think learning to love ourselves, for many, if not most of us, is the biggest and most important aspect of transition, wherever we are in that process and life journey. I watch so many people who seem desperate for affirmation, acceptance from others. After sixty years I know that this is a recipe for bitter disappointment and disaster. We alone are the only ones who can find our inner peace and self-acceptance, and without it, we are like dependent children.
The temptation is always to live, think, and work with the physical, material aspect of our being; how we look, how we feel about our looks, constantly wanting something we feel we lack, and we neglect the single most important aspect of our being, our inner peace.
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| "I think learning to love ourselves, for many, if not most of us, is the biggest and most important aspect of transition, wherever we are in that process and life journey." |
Monika: But?
Chrissie: What I'm saying is this; if the trans community upholds 'passing' as the goal, the 'Holy Grail' of being trans, then we heap intolerable suffering on all those who do not have the privilege of being able to undertake surgery and all the cosmetic procedures needed to 'pass'. Young kids born into poverty are almost forced into sex work to pay for their surgery, how can that be right? I see so many who have transitioned physically and it's as if it's an entirely personal existence? Do we care enough for those who can't transition, because of lack of funds or access? Is it just about me, or can we help the trans youth who follow on behind us? If we uphold hyper-femininity as our priority and value, aren't we just flogging the Hollywood Myth?
How many transwomen hate themselves because they don't pass? Is that healthy? Is it healthy to be obsessed with 'passing'?
I don't know, I'm just trying to live with crippling gender dysphoria and dysmorphia.
I ask the question because I want to help, care for and love those who come behind us. Is perpetuating the 'passing' narrative in the best interests of the health of the wider trans community? My instinct is that it causes untold misery, yet I find myself caught up in its power. The thought of my shadow showing through my foundation can stop me from even walking out my own front door, so it's an ever-present threat;
'I don't pass!'
I can't even afford laser treatment, so I pluck, and then at least I can enjoy a couple of weeks fear-free and be Cinderella with no fear of midnight.
Monika: Then what is your trick?
Chrissie: I have always found that loving others is the surest way out of my own personal suffering and self-absorption, in trying to care for the trans community I am caring and looking after myself. Love is greater than fear, and I look for ways I can love, rather than focus on the things that create fear in my life.
Things like 'Do I pass?'. 'If I do this, or if I do that, will I pass?' All of which are fear-laden questions and goals. I'm trans, FFS! I may never pass, I've accepted that and I have total peace about it. Yes, I still suffer acute and crushing gender dysphoria and dysmorphia, but it has taken the destructive power from them. It's like managing depression or a disability in that sense.
Maybe this will piss off a lot of folks, but I'm beyond caring, I have as much right to speak as anyone else in the trans community, and I want to give a message of hope, love, and self-acceptance to all those who feel, like me, that they don't 'pass', may never 'pass', and may never be able to have the choice to even undergo surgery, or even afford hormones, laser treatment, or a nice wardrobe.
I'm proud to be trans; neither male nor female, but between.
Monika: My pen friend Gina Grahame wrote to me once that we should not limit our potential because of how we were born or by what we see other transgender people doing. Our dreams should not end on an operating table; that’s where they begin. Do you agree with this?
Chrissie: I think probably my above comments cover this. The operating table is the privilege of a precious few. What about all of us who may not ever get the chance to enjoy its benefits? What do we tell them? How do we live our lives? If our dreams can only start on an operating table, what hope is there for the rest of us?
You may think I sound bitter or jealous, I'm not. I genuinely rejoice for every single one of my trans brothers, sisters, and others who get to physical transition.
I'm also very aware of those who have transitioned and look down on those of us who haven't, as lesser beings, 'not women', and would throw us under their bus to protect their own newfound status and privilege. Transwomen who oppose changes to the Gender Recognition Act in the UK being a classic example, mentioning no names of course.
There is a lot of bitterness and judgment within the trans community. It's a hard place to live as a transwoman if you still look male-bodied, but rather than acknowledge these things, we tend to sweep them under the carpet, not talk about them. I see transwomen who are obviously male-bodied. Some of them have found peace, but many suffer from chronic mental health battles, caused by social rejection, but sadly caused by rejection that they receive even within the trans community. The 'passing' narrative we uphold as the gold standard inflicts untold suffering on some.
I would love to help change the narrative we uphold, from the emphasis upon the operating table to an emphasis on acceptance and affirmation of those who don't fulfill the criteria of hyper-femininity and have no chance of ever doing so. Are there other ways of dealing with gender dysphoria and dysmorphia?
I don't know for sure, I'm a living experiment, trying to find the answer. I'll let you know if I ever find an answer, I suspect I'll be on my deathbed when I finally do know for sure, lol.
Monika: Chrissie, it was a pleasure to interview you. Thanks a lot!
All the photos: courtesy of Chrissie Chevasutt.
© 2021 - Monika Kowalska
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