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Dissociation, Part II
By the mid-1980’s, my dissociative inner life was coming to a crisis point. I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with my gender-of-origin body and yet, as I explored the means of changing that, I realized that the process was simply too traumatic (emotionally and physically) and too expensive for me to engage in. I started to become aware of transsexuality in the early ’80’s, and did some research on the Gender Reassignment Clinic in Trinidad, Colorado, where Dr. Stanley Biber was pioneering some techniques to sexually reconstruct males into females.
I was, concurrently, becoming quite dissatisfied with the reaction that females had to me in my life. As a male, I very much was influenced by the feminist movement and greatly desired an intimate relationship with politically and socially feminist woman, but my experience was of continually meeting women who ‘talked the talked’, but in very critical ways failed to ‘walk the walk’ of feminism. They ‘talked a good line’ about being feminist women and wanting equal relationships, but when it came to an equal sexual, financial, and emotional investment in an intimate relationship with me, they dropped back into suffocatingly traditional female roles. [See my articles on the equality of the sexes and equitable dating.] It was like they wanted equality for themselves, but were unwilling - or unable - to support equality for their male partner (me). In the midst of my frustration and dissatisfaction, I explored, quite hesitantly, same-sex relationships, but realized quickly that that was not my ‘cup of tea’. However awkward it might be, I was a heterosexually driven person [this applied to both my dissociative female side and my sex-of-origin male side].
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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001
to help men become emotionally healthy.
